Speaker Series
Christchurch
Thursday 12 August, 7.30am - 9am
James Hay Theatre, Christchurch Town Hall
*Doors open from 6.30am
Join us for a networking breakfast, and hear from some of our amazing speakers including:
Raelene Castle – Sport NZ CEO
Dr Lucy Hone – Resilience and Wellbeing expert
Lucy Blakiston – shityoushouldcareabout co-founder
With host Carmen Parahi (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Hine) – Pou Tiaki Editor, Stuff
Speakers:
Raelene Castle
Raelene is the Chief Executive of Sport New Zealand. She joined the organisation in December 2020 after seven years working in Australia as Chief Executive of the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs and then Chief Executive of Rugby Australia. She was previously Chief Executive of Netball New Zealand from 2007 to 2013.
Before beginning her career in sports administration, Raelene built a successful corporate career in communications, sales and marketing. This included general management and other senior roles at Telecom New Zealand (now Spark), Bank of New Zealand and Fuji Xerox.
Raelene has held several governance roles in sport, previously serving as a board director of the ANZ Championship Netball, International Federations of Netball Associations, SANZAAR Rugby and the World Rugby Council.
She also has a rich sporting background as a former representative-level netball, tennis and lawn bowls player.
Raelene was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in 2015 for services to Business and Sport.
Dr Lucy Hone
While resilience researchers are a fast-growing breed, the death of her 12-year-old daughter in a tragic road accident makes Dr Lucy Hone's skillset quite unique.
Whether it’s delivering training, writing academic articles, books, columns and blogs, creating conferences and online courses, or consulting for NGOs and government agencies, she’s been on a long-term mission to bolster population health by busting myths and bringing the best of science to the masses. The arrival of Covid-19, however, saw her TED talk go viral, transporting her work from New Zealand to the world. Collaborations with the BBC and Insight Timer, and an international publishing deal, swiftly followed.
Originally from London, trained by the thought leaders in the field at the University of Pennsylvania, now adjunct senior fellow at the University of Canterbury and co-founder of the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience, her research is published in internationally and her PhD was acknowledged for its outstanding contribution to wellbeing science.
Lucy Blakiston
Lucy co-founded Shityoushouldcareabout in 2018 with best friends Ruby Edwards and Olivia Mercer, with the goal of “explaining the world in words we understand”. Covering a wide range of topics from mental health to pop culture to women’s rights on their news site, they’ve attracted more than 2.9 million social media followers, including the likes of Ariana Grande, Dua Lipa and Chrissy Teigen.
“We whole-bloody-heartedly believe that we should all be able to understand the news and the world around us because it’s happening to all of us,” Lucy says.
“We cut through the bullshit, the jargon, the clickbait, the ‘fake news,’ the paywalls - all of the shit that makes information feel inaccessible - and make it accessible (with a few Harry Styles pictures thrown in there for good measure).”
with Host Carmen Parahi (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Hine)
Carmen was recently awarded 2021 Editorial Executive of the Year and Runner Up Reporter of the Year at the New Zealand Voyager Media Awards.
Carmen has worked as a journalist since 2001, when she studied for her journalism diploma at Massey University and worked at various community and regional papers during the course. From 2002 to 2017, she worked as a television reporter and producer in news and current affairs programmes at TV3, TVNZ and Māori Television.
Since 2018, Carmen has worked at Stuff as a national correspondent and then last year, as the Pou Tiaki editor focused on te ao Māori and diversity. She helped lead Stuff's historical apology and reckoning published in October last year, part one of Our Truth, Tā Mātou Pono. Part two of the project, focused on challenging history, was published on Waitangi Day and rolled out over several months.