This is why advocacy matters. ASSITEJ International rests on a rights-based argument. Under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, every child has the right to take part freely in cultural life and the arts. That right does not shrink when an economy does. Funding for young audiences should not be a gesture. It should keep children at the centre.
It is spring in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. Aotea Square was full of glowing lights. Children ran between them with no rules to follow. Parents chase behind, then give up and simply watch.
This is We The Young, a festival for children that has just finished its second year. I walked in as an audience member. I walked out thinking about belonging.
A few moments stayed with me. Children building a world of light, then stepping inside it. Children queuing at a polling booth, making placards and casting their votes with great seriousness. Circus performed in te reo Māori, where I did not understand every word but understood all of it. A puppet story set in a noodle stall, about carrying home with you.
None of this happens by accident. Behind every show are artists and producers who chose this work. They chose an audience that does not buy subscriptions or write reviews. They chose people who will tell you, very honestly, when they are bored. That is a brave choice. In many countries, it is also a fragile one.
I know that fragility. For years I worked with children and young people in Pakistan. There, as in so many places, children’s arts often survived on goodwill, short grants and the stubbornness of a few people. Aotearoa is a different context, but the questions are the same. Who decides that children’s culture matters? Whose budget does it sit in? And when money is tight, why are children so often the first to lose?
This is why advocacy matters. ASSITEJ International rests on a rights-based argument. Under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, every child has the right to take part freely in cultural life and the arts. That right does not shrink when an economy does. Funding for young audiences should not be a gesture. It should keep children at the centre.
Watching these shows, I kept thinking about home. Or rather, homes. In Pakistan, belonging was something I was born into: a language, a neighbourhood, a season of festivals. In Auckland, belonging is something I am still learning. It arrives in small moments. A child laughing at the same joke as me. A word in te reo Māori I now recognise.
Belonging, I have learned, has many shapes. It can be inherited. It can be chosen. It can be offered by a stranger. What does not change is our need for it.
ASSITEJ is built on that need. We are National Centres, networks and artists working in very different conditions. Some of us have venues and festivals. Some of us have a borrowed room and a great deal of hope. Yet we share the same values wherever we operate. We believe children are cultural citizens now, not later.
As a member of the Executive Committee, this is what I find most rewarding. I see impact measured in many ways and built from many kinds of resources. A free installation in a city square. A puppet show in a school hall. A network meeting across time zones. Each one counts, and each one teaches the rest of us something.
Next year we will gather in Suwon City, South Korea, for the ASSITEJ World Congress, from 21 July to 1 August 2027. Child Participation is one of its focus topics. I will be thinking of those children at the polling booth in Auckland. They already know what participation feels like.
The festival in Auckland is over now. The lights in Aotea Square have been packed away. But I still think of one child, explaining the rules of a game that had no rules, while everyone around them listened.
That, for me, is belonging.
