Kiwi Dreaming updates

February, 2022

Kia ora e te Ohana whānau,

Ngā mihi o te tau hou! Gosh is it 2022 already?! With all that pandemic stuff going on it’s hard to believe it was 22 months ago that we were in touch with you all…

It sure is hard to make light of a small group of proteins that’s wreaked such havoc on the world, but I guess if we didn’t have a laugh then the opposite would be true, and best to try and keep things positive!

Firstly and importantly, we hope you are all doing well, wherever in the world you are - keeping yourselves and your families happy and healthy, and continuing to be able to work in whatever mode possible. Here in New Zealand we’ve largely weathered the Delta storm, but just as we thought our orange traffic light 🚦 was going to mean the start of events again, Omicron has put a big red stop sign in front of that plan 😞 .

So we are kind of where we were just under two years ago. Not at all ideal, but it’s safe to say we are still just as determined that Kiwi Dreaming will see the light of day, and hopefully this year 🤞 . What is exciting and encouraging is that we have the “backbone” of the operation still in place - logos, potential sponsors, even down to some of the speakers whom we hope are still just as interested! We still have to deal with border closures, gathering limits, and the risk associated with putting on any event now that covid is out and about. But rest assured, if we can do so safely, we will march on with plans to get the Kiwi up and flying!

Thanks for all your support, and hopefully 2022 is the year we can finally say we’ve hosted the inaugural Kiwi Dreaming event. Look out for a survey in the next little while, as we start to think about event format and location, as we would love to get your input on what you’re comfortable with.

Thanks,

The Kiwi Dreaming team.

March 12th, 2020

Dear Kiwi Dreaming supporters,

We started planning Kiwi Dreaming last October, with a view to bringing the Trailblazer community ‘Dreaming’ concept to New Zealand, with a distinctly Kiwi flavour. Since then, as we’ve moved into the key planning phase of the event, we have seen what can happen in a short period of time, with the COVID-19 outbreak moving from a minor inconvenience to now having effects on health, travel & the economy globally.

With this in mind, it is making it increasingly difficult for us to confirm the state of sponsors and speakers as we lead up to the event. While we and the MOH in New Zealand believe the direct health threat to be extremely low, this information still changes from day to day, and we also see that the ability to make firm decisions by participants and sponsors is severely affected. This in turn means that putting on a top-class Dreaming event also becomes harder.

After thoughtful consideration of the current state of the outbreak, as well as likely trends, we believe the best course of action is to postpone Kiwi Dreaming from its current date of May 7th. It is important to us to maintain the interactions, learning, and networking that can be gained from an in person event, and to put on a high-class event that meets and exceeds expectations, while not endangering our attendees, speakers, and sponsors.

We hope you can understand this is an extremely tough decision to make. We are aware that some attendees have already booked travel. We have some sponsors who are keen to be involved, and we have had an amazing response from our call for speakers. We are still 100% committed to putting on an awesome event, but until we can be more definite about doing so, we believe postponement is the best course of action at this stage. We don’t have a specific target date, and will monitor the situation closely in the coming weeks.

If you are in Auckland on May 7th, we will still do something more in line with a user group meeting, although hopefully with elements of what we had planned for Kiwi Dreaming. Stay tuned to social and trailblazercommunitygroups.com and we’ll have more details soon.

Thanks for all of your support so far, and we will continue to be in touch as we think about our next steps.

Stephen, Jo & Anna
The Kiwi Dreaming organising team.