Transcript
DAVID GRAY: Well the starting point for understanding where TupuToa is coming from is the face that when one looks at the corporate sector in New Zealand, our largest companies, our big professional firms, they're overwhelmingly pale, male, and stale, and when you consider against that that Maori and Pasifika together make up 22 percent and growing of the New Zealand population, that's not good enough and that's something we aspire to change. So it's our mission over time to create a cohort of young Maori and Pasifika business leaders who will change the face literally of corporate New Zealand.
DON WISEMAN: Alright, so you're going to do that by doing what?
DG: We're going to do that by doing two things. The first thing we're doing is offering a programme of internships, we have a range of profile sponsors who've swung in behind us and with whom we are offering internships and in preparation for those internships we'll do two things, we'll prepare the interns for the world of work, doing all the usual things, making sure they know what to expect, making sure that they're well prepared for interviews and have got a flash CV and all that kind of thing. But the more important dimension of what we're doing is working with our students in the cultural space. We want to ensure that their cultural intelligence is as high as it can be to make sure they are strong and secure in their own cultures, that they understand the value their culture contributes to an organisation in terms of diversity. There's a truckload of research out there which shows the hard concrete economic value that diversity contributes to organisations and we want our interns to understand that and to understand that they contribute that value to organisations when they join them and we're giving them a range of tools to use in that setting.
DW: OK, when you say you're going to provide paid internships over what period of time is that for?
DG: They'll be summer internships which will typically run from late November to late February.
DW: These are going to be people who what, are between a university year? what?
DG: Yes longer term, we anticipate picking up our interns in their second year of studies so that by the time they graduate they will have done two possibly three internships with us and we will have had quite an opportunity to invest in them, strengthen them and make sure they're well prepared for the world that they'll encounter when they graduate. This year being our first year, we're taking interns from right across the spectrum, first years through to final years.
DW: But eventually you'll be dealing with hundreds of people, that's the idea?
DG: That's very much the idea Don, we are starting small so we have only 24 internships this year, next year we are aiming for 75, the year after that 150 so we have some fairly aggressive numbers that we are pursuing.
