How can youth make a difference and influence global policy and change?

Let’s network and tuck into a delicious full English breakfast while hosting Sophie Handford, New Zealand’s youngest Councillor in over a decade. Her experience and youth may be confronting for some yet as business and community leaders we need to listen carefully to this voice as we act and go about post COVID recovery and beyond.rning and often negotiating deals when we are networking.

Sophie has recently been named winner of Forest & Bird’s Te Kaiārahi Rangatahi o te Taiao youth award after a year in which she led New Zealand’s School Strike 4 Climate movement and became one of the youngest ever local body councillors in New Zealand. Sophie was voted in as the Paekākāriki / Raumati Ward Councillor on the Kāpiti Coast District Council in 2019.

When Sophie Handford was 12, she vividly remembers her Mum and Dad getting a letter in the mail from Kāpiti Coast District Council. They sat at the table looking rather worried over what was written, and she had to find out why. The message alerted her family to the fact that the sea could seep into their home in the coming decades. She was extremely concerned about why this would be and what she could do to stop it as it made her feel scared and fearful for her generation’s future.

In 2019 Sophie was the National Coordinator of the School Strike 4 Climate NZ, and at 18 years old she did not shy away from this challenge or the media it created.

In 2020 COVID-19 prompted her to work with others to establish the Facebook Group, Self-Isolation Support Kapiti and to work with the New Zealand Student Volunteer Army.

Life matters to Sophie.

See you there! Book early to avoid disappointment.

About the Speaker

Sophie Handford | Councillor Handford | Past Head Girl Kāpiti College & Student Representative Board of Trustees | National Youth Leader Climate Change Action

Sophie is from Paekakariki and she is passionate about her community, its social and cultural diversity, its vulnerable coastal environment, and its vocal activism. She is also concerned about those in our community that struggle to have their needs met and is never willing to sit on her hands when others are struggling and are not being supported by the status quo. She believes in working together to support diversity and aroha for a flourishing future where business and community are one.