History

Trevor Grice founded Life Education in New Zealand in 1988. After twenty years helping addicted people, and after seeing many unnecessary deaths of New Zealand's young people, Trevor realised that equal emphasis needed to be put into prevention through education.

In 1987, he was approached by a group of people, who had heard about Ted and Margaret Noffs' work developing and starting the Life Education concept in Australia. They were looking for a suitable person to spearhead Life Education in New Zealand. Trevor went to Australia to meet with Ted, only to find that he had suffered a massive stroke a few days before and was in hospital, however Margaret met Trevor at Ted's famous Wayside Chapel (in Kings Cross, Sydney, a renowned drop-in centre for addicts looking for help) and left Trevor there in Ted's office to read through Ted's writings.

As Trevor read, he fell in love with the idea of Life Education. He loved the innovation of the programme, of capturing children's imagination using technology and building their self-esteem at a young age. Every addict Trevor helped brought home to him the need to dramatise the fact "that there is no such thing as a nothing". Most youngsters in trouble had fused into their brain the belief that they were worth nothing. Low self-esteem, caused by all the ravages of addiction, prostitution, destitution and corruption, had most times seeded in early life.

Trevor was excited to see that in designing the Life Education programme, Ted concluded we must get to children from their very first lessons and build their self-esteem. Ted used a quote from the Roman philosopher Horace who was speaking to educators outside a roman emporium, "that new vessels will for long retain the taste of what is first poured into them."

Trevor spent time with Margaret Noffs, and watched the Australian teachers in mobile classrooms and fixed centres teaching the Life Education programme, and came back to New Zealand with Margaret's blessing to start Life Education in New Zealand.

In 1989, New Zealand's Prime Minister, the Hon. David Lange, endorsed Life Education and encouraged New Zealanders to support the programme. Trevor met with the Ministry of Education, and they created the first links document for Life Education (NZ), that showed where our programme linked in to the school curriculum. In 1990 Howard Morrison raised awareness of Life Education by riding on horse from New Zealand's most southern city, Invercargill, to its most northern point, Cape Reinga, in an event called Ride For Life. This event was an awesome task as Life Education did not have a budget to plan and create such an epic event, and all together, $1.2 million was raised to go towards the delivery of the programme in New Zealand. The success of the event was largely due to many sponsors and the overwhelming commitment from enthusiastic people in New Zealand's towns as support came from service clubs, mayors, parents, doctors, teachers, media, businessmen, maraes and celebrities.

We are grateful to our many sponsors and supporters who have helped us deliver our message over the years. Our current sponsors are listed on our homepage. We are particularly grateful to Brierley's, who gave us the original start up funding to get Life Education underway in New Zealand.

A special tribute must be paid to David Wale, a Wellington businessman, who grasped the vision of Life Education in 1988 and has been a strong supporter ever since. David has been very involved in the functioning of the organisation, as national fundraising manager, board member, six years as national chairman, and his current role as the national patron of Life Education. In addition David used his considerable influence to bring Life Education to many areas in New Zealand. Further, when our hardworking directors were flagging in spirit during difficult economic times, David gave them motivation at crucial moments, insisting that in the long term, finance would not be our main difficulty; however professionalism in administration, accountability, transparency and never deviating from our fundamental philosophy must be our most important task in the days that lie ahead.

Recently we have worked with school principals to develop a new module and are overhauling the existing modules, audio visual clips and resources. We now offer 19 learning modules to primary and intermediate schools that can be adapted to meet specific curriculum needs. All our learning modules are based on Ted Noffs' original philosophy.