Is this what you mean?
Damien Grant is an Auckland business owner and a regular opinion contributor for Stuff, writing from a libertarian perspective.
OPINION: Early in the book
Once Were Warriors Beth is watching television and notices that the houses on television are filled with books. She inspects the house she shares with Jake and comes to the realisation that there are no books. None of the houses Beth has ever lived in had books.
Once Were Warriors, like Beth, was the creation of Alan Duff and her observation was, as he told me as we were trundling through a bus in the Netherlands, his. The relative under-performance of MÄori, Duff believed, was in part due to a lack of reading. You canāt read if you donāt have books.
Bethās insight drove Duff to do something. He doesnāt merely want to observe. He wants to have an impact and putting books into houses was one way of achieving this. So, 31 years back, in the euphoria of this writing success, he began a program to do exactly that.
This was the mid-1990s and Duff was the nationās expert on issues facing MÄori. A young child was murdered and Duff was on camera giving his perspective and the program caught the attention of Mainfreight founder Bruce Plested, who, thankfully for this story, is on the same bus. More on that in a moment.
Plested, as Duff tells it, āgot my number from somewhereā and asked how he could help. The details get a little foggy here. We are going back over three decades. The takeaway is Plested sent Duff a cheque large enough to establish a trust that has endured and now runs a program in some 500 low-decile schools providing books to junior school students.
Duffās programme, Duffy Books in Homes, has endured.
āThere are three aspectsā Duff explains. The child chooses the book, although from a selection curated by the school. The books are new. The books become the property of the student.
Plested remained engaged. He isnāt a distant philanthropist and as we chatted at the back of bus to Amsterdam he rattled off the schemeās successes, frustrations, and the strategies used to ensure the books were read.
āWeād get heroesā he explained, to go to the schools and tell how their success could not have been achieved without reading.
āWe got Zinzan Brooke,ā Duff went on, admitting that an author, even one as successful as himself, wasnāt going to have the impact that a sports star would achieve.
The logistics tycoon scrolled through his phone to show me an email from a young medical student who attended a speech by former US presidential hopeful Ben Carson, who visited Auckland for a Duffy Books in Homes fund raiser.
She was inspired, the email explains, by Carson, a exceptionally gifted surgeon, to become a doctor and is now on her way.
Plested is a failed teacher; lasting only a year before leaving the classroom to the boardroom, but he retains the passion for education and places his money and energy where he believes it can achieve the most impact.
The program is limited to junior schools. Duff tried senior schools but accepted that once the kids got to intermediate without reading āIt was too late. We lost them.ā
Duffy Books is now bigger than its founder. Over a dozen staff work for the charity and it has a wider sponsorship base than Mainfreight. āIt is a teamā the author is insistent to explain, and the program recently celebrated the delivery of 15 million books into homes.
Meanwhile his partner in this enterprise delights in telling a story about how Kaiti School, near Gisborne, achieve a 90% attendance by deploying kuia to chase down stragglers, and his enthusiasm for remains undiminished.
Duffy Books in Homes is a private solution to a public failure and it exists because these two men were willing to put their time and capital into improving lives. They have demonstrated their ideas work and have brought others into the scheme. Plested is a relentless champion, pushing his peers to open their cheque books and has brought the energy that brought Mainfreight to the globe to this venture.
Duff, Plested and 40 other chief executives, business leaders and, incongruously, myself, are on the NZ Initiative tour of the Netherlands looking for ideas and inspiration to bring back to New Zealand. And I will write up the outcomes of this adventure when I have assembled them in my mind.
But it is the things you find when you are not looking for them that can be the most interesting. And the friendship, and its enduring impact, of the billionaire and the author on the lives of hundreds of thousands
