Hi there everyone, my name is Andre Robertson Bates and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this webinar. We're going to be talking about the Edmund Hillary Fellowship. We are blessed to have a number of fellows joining the call today. So we have Nate Culhoun, we have Ali Lossil-Ben, if I pronounced that right, Culhoun. We have Jeff Shuffles and we have Chris Simcock joining us as well, as well as Paola who's also part of the team at EHF. So how we're going to do this for today is for the first maybe 10 minutes, I'm going to just give a bit of a 101 about EHF. So talking about the Global Impact Visa, talking about New Zealand, then we'll spend most of this time with a chance to talk with our fellows to get the sense of what it actually is, what it actually looks like to be part of EHF. And we also, I came to hear from you, came to hear your questions, so we'll make it interactive as we go. So if you have any questions for us, the best way for you to do that is a Q&A box that should be down the bottom of the window that you can see. So if you click on that, if you have any questions, you can write them in there. And then we can either respond to them in a discussion if they're applicable to everyone or if they're specialised for you, then we can answer them in written form as well. Another thing to mention is that this recording is going to be made available on YouTube afterwards and also it's live streamed on Facebook as well, so just so that you're aware of that. Okay, I'm going to kick off just to say as well, so I'm Andre Robertson-Bates, so I lead the selection process for EHF, just to give context. Okay, so I'm just going to give a 10-minute sort of summary of the fellowship and before we jump in to the fellows sharing their experiences of the fellowship. So we're building a community of people that are going to make global change from New Zealand and will unpack what that looks like. So in this discussion, we're going to talk about the nuts and bolts of what does it mean to be a fellow, what does it actually look like. So here's a little bit of a kind of a thumbnail of that. So we have new frontiers summits every six months for fellows to come and meet with other fellows and other entrepreneurs and change makers and government representatives in New Zealand. That's every six months. Those who are or who join the fellowship, you have the welcome week retreat where you get to chance to meet all of your, all of your fellows, but also retreats for particular cohorts as well. So you can have a chance to catch up with your fellows. The original gatherings. So for example, in Wellington, there's a monthly dinner where fellows come together. There's an online portal for people to connect. As well as informal collaboration, people saying, Hey, you know, can you help me with my project on this or any ideas on XYZ. And finally, there's support from the EHF team in terms of helping you as you, if you move your venture and your family to New Zealand, or just questions around who to connect with in the ecosystem here in New Zealand. This is, these are some photos from New Frontiers Summit. So just to give you a sense of people connecting and learning. We have James Cameron and his wife talking at one of our recent events. So a little bit briefly on New Zealand and what's a great place to come and live and work from. So New Zealand has strong political and civil rights. It's often rated as the less corruption, less corrupt country in the world by transparency international. And it's the second most peaceful country in the world. And as a bonus, you get beautiful scenery in terms of New Zealand culture. So New Zealand has made maybe some, maybe more steps than some other countries in terms of working with our indigenous communities. There's obviously more, more there to be, to be worked through. But it's, it's something that we're dealing with or grappling with as a nation. We were the first country to give women the right to vote and later on diversity, creativity, generosity and happiness. And New Zealand's a great place for scaling ventures. So it's first in the world in terms of ease of doing business, has strong trade connections and a great workforce. Now just a couple of quick case studies on ventures doing great things from New Zealand. So Weta Digital, who created Lord of the Rings, Avatar, you can see a picture here. So they pretty much created New Zealand's film industry from nothing with Peter Jackson and Co. Zero is an online software, accounting software business, which started in New Zealand and then being able to try things out in New Zealand at small scale, helped them to fully develop their product. So they could go to Australia and the UK and the US and say, hey, look, here's New Zealand where we have a quarter of SMEs connected or whatever the number is and all the banks and government. So then being based in a small country helped them kind of demonstrate what they could do as they scale to bigger markets. And then we have Lanzateco creating biofuels and Rocket Lab, who are launching, I have the capacity to launch more flights than the whole of the United States combined. And that's in a place where until Rocket Lab came along, there was no enabling legislation. So that kind of gives a picture of what you can do in terms of getting a framework for your venture to get off the ground, no pun intended. A little bit now about what we're looking for in people who are applying as well as how to get involved. And then in a couple of minutes time, we'll pass it over to our fellows. Selection criteria. So we want people who have a bold vision to solve systemic challenges, who have the ability to deliver on their vision and that's an important thing. And there are different ways of showing your ability to deliver on it. So being able to show you've done it in the past or the progress that you're making or the plans that you've got for your current venture. And we look not just at, excuse me, startups per se, but also we look at nonprofits or other types of things that you might have done that show your ability to get things done. Thirdly, your ability to connect with New Zealand is important and that could mean moving to New Zealand permanently or it can involve helping New Zealand ventures or investing in New Zealand ventures that we're looking for a long-term connection that will be mutually beneficial. Fourth, we look at people who are going to be great community members who will contribute and we can partner with them over a long period of time. And then finally, people who will be good ambassadors for New Zealand. And we have these selection criteria on our apply page. That's ehf.org forward slash apply. One of the pieces that we, this is not just a tick box exercise, but we look at these holistically and we look at the strength of how people fit this rather than a yes, no, do they fit it, yes or no. Okay, now how to get involved. So the early bird deadline for cohort four closes tonight, then New Zealand time. So we've got another, whatever it is, 11, just under 11 hours. Then final applications for, you know, the final deadline for cohort four is the second of September. A selection process goes from September through November to September.  And that involves our team doing much research as well as an independent selection panel. Then the, then people who are from, who are internationals can apply for a global impact visa once they've been offered a place in the fellowship. Then our welcome for cohort four fellows is in March. And then after that, the fellowship continues. And there's a, in terms of the visa there, the visa enables you to work and study and to invest and start up ventures in New Zealand. There are conditions there. So it's worth looking into at Migration NZ's website. There's the option to, to apply for permanent residency after around three years and there are conditions there. So worth looking into. Okay, so just a reminder of dates. Early bird applications close very soon in under 11 hours. Cohort four applications close on the second of September and welcome week is early next year in March. Okay, the, and the, the key page to look at is EHF.org forward slash apply and there's more information on the site about fees. And for anyone who's looking at this video after the second of September, the, the, the fee details may change from cohort to cohort. So it's worth going to EHF.org forward slash apply to check the latest in terms of fees and dates. Okay, I'm going to switch gears. That was a brief kind of intro to EHF. I'm going to stop the, the screen share. So now you can see the lovely faces of, of our fellows and so the opportunity for us here is to, to go into a bit more depth about what being part of the fellowship actually involves. What does it actually look like? So what I, what I suggest is an opportunity for each of our fellows here just to briefly introduce yourself and then after that I'll chip in with a couple of questions and I will also be open for any questions that people on the call have as well. So if you have any questions, then you can click the Q&A box and you can submit questions to, to anyone, anyone here as well. So maybe, maybe, maybe Chris, do you want to make a start? Sure, thanks Andre. Hi everyone. My name's Chris Simcock. I'm the, the founder of a company called Impact Ventures, which alongside our partners have founded and launched New Zealand's first Impact Investing Fund, which is, which has been great to get into the market. So we're now out there looking for entrepreneurs and small business owners that have big growth aspirations and are looking to solve big problems. So we've raised just over $8 million at the time we did a first close back in February. By the time we do a final close, it'll be a bit bigger than that. And so we're just trolling, trying to find any business that, that fits our mandate and have to say from an investor's perspective, we've been very pleased with what we've seen. Over 150 businesses in the year to date. And just on myself, quickly, I'm a Kiwi. So I've come into, into the program as a, as a local fellow. And I thoroughly enjoyed getting to, to meet all the other people in my cohort and, and getting from their experiences for more in the world. Do you want to, do you want to nominate who goes next? Maybe we'll play a game of tag. I think Nate's looking eager down there. Cool. I'm Nathaniel Calhoun. I split my time between speaking and teaching, often on behalf of Singularity University, where I'm the chair of Global Grand Challenge faculty. Have a bit of a focus there on the future of education, of work, of governance, and kind of novel business approaches to business and business models. When I'm not doing that type of teaching or program design, I'm working at Code Innovation, which is a company that helps to build technologies for international aid and development organizations to deliver their programming more effectively. So we try to find often poverty alleviation programs or other programs that are working really well in the field, but don't include technology and then try to work with the people that are already expert in those programs to figure out what we could build them to help them do their mission better and get their solution into more places more quickly. Jeff, why don't you follow us up? Yeah, great. Thanks. Hi, everybody. My name is Jeff Sharples, and we are working on a venture that is aimed at providing equitable access to clean and resilient energy. The rationale for that is currently access to clean energy is often based on your capacity to pay, and so solar and other companies tend to target those with great credit, which makes good sense. But what we've observed is that that sometimes creates an imbalance in terms of who gets access to that energy. And then recently there are trends when natural disasters happen, and they seem to happen with increasing frequency, that those with clean energy and access to clean energy can often get back up and running faster than those that are reliant solely on the grid. So there's two elements. One is equitable access to clean energy, and the other is access to more resilient power. So New Zealand's actually a great country to try this out in, because there's a mix of city but also a lot of rural areas, and those areas are served by relatively small grid companies, which will allow us to develop programs there, which can then be scaled globally. So with that, I will pass the baton to Ellie. Thanks, Jeff. I'm Ellie Lozli van Kelhun, really happy to be here. My background is mostly in Africa. That's where I was raised. Most of my professional life has been there. And I've been working with social entrepreneurs and with women entrepreneurs in particular for the last decade using technology very recently from New Zealand, which is new. So I'm a full time since the first cohort in the far north. So of course, although I run a tech company from here that's working in Africa and working with poorest of the poor and using technology, I'm also really wanting to and embedded in learning about how to contribute up here, because there are a lot of really, really interesting opportunities, particularly around the future of work and how we interact with our environment and our communities that fascinate me. So I'm very much enjoying having chosen to be here and looking forward to the questions that people have. Thanks for that, Ellie. And thanks everyone for sharing a bit of your story. So I'm going to kick it off by asking some questions that link to what does the fellowship actually involve. So I'll just kind of pick kind of themes of and it links to those slides before of those four things of what does the fellowship involve. So maybe just welcome week. So maybe experiences of welcome week. How did you find it compared to what you'd expected? The first thing I always tell people about welcome week is how tired I was by about seven o'clock, eight o'clock at night every day, just having incredibly well, firstly, purposeful conversations, which was quite refreshing, but just incredibly intelligent people who've done amazing things. Every conversation you feel like you need to be on your game, just a great, great setting to stretch your mind, stretch your kind of lens on how you look at things and analyze problems. And just thoroughly enjoyed the networking and building connections with some some pretty talented people. Yeah, this is Jeff again. And one of the things that was really interesting is as an applicant, you apply either with your team or by yourself. And you do know who the other cohort members are going to be. So when you arrive, you're really kind of curious about, OK, how am I going to interact with folks? How can I help people? How will they be able to help me and the the capacity and sort of the welcoming of everyone to figure out what you're doing, how they can help you is really cool. But the thing that really struck me is as you're applying, you're sort of applying to EHF as this organization. And once you're once you're in, once you're part of the cohort, at least for me, I began to realize, oh, I am EHF, right?  And so that is sort of a fantastic feeling in terms of it's not sort of a separate entity, but you're all part of the same entity. And then that continues as after Welcome Week, we're all sort of connected online. We connect in our local cities. And so it's really a change in experience from I'm an individual entrepreneur with the team that I'm working with to gee, I'm part of a much bigger whole. I would add, for me, Welcome Week also had a lot of pieces about New Zealand culture that I wasn't expecting, particularly the Maori culture and the pieces of welcoming us as newcomers to Aotearoa within that framework. I did not expect the vision and the values to be so embedded in the structure of the week. And I thought that was really well done by EHF. Yeah, so it was much more of a community from the beginning than I expected it to be. And it's become much more that every time we assemble every six months now. Thanks, everyone. I realized that I forgot to introduce one of the most important people, if not the most important person at EHF. Paola, you blew the candle. Keeps everything ticking along and going. So Paola, why don't you introduce yourself to us? Kia ora. I'm Paola. I'm part of the EHF team. I'm a Wellington base. And part of my responsibility is about fellow support, community support, and team support. So it's kind of a little bit of everything, which is super exciting because I'm always aware of what's going on. So probably if you reach to us, I will be behind that answer. And now that we're talking about Welcome Week, I just want to say that it's an event that we all of us take part of it in different ways. And we take really advantage of sharing with the fellows and getting to know them in a better and more human way. And then in frontiers, it's more like the business part. So it has the both parts of getting to know each other and knowing the community and networking. And every time I learn something new about the Maori culture, which is always super exciting. Kia ora. Thank you. And so just add into that, yeah, so the Welcome Week, and maybe just touching on the second cohort, which we just welcomed in April. So the Welcome Week is in a beautiful location, which is maybe an hour out of Central Wellington. It's on a rural setting. So it's beautiful. And there's a relatively small group of people. The cohort size last time was, I think, around 30 or 40 people. And so a chance to get to know everyone well and kind of go deep at a personal level. And not so much just, hey, here's what I do. Here's my LinkedIn profile. But more of a getting to know people at a personal level. And then after that, four days, spending time with your cohort, then after a weekend, there's a slight chance for a break. It morphs into new frontiers, which is a gathering with cohorts, or fellows from all cohorts, as well as other entrepreneurs from New Zealand and government and other stakeholders. So over to you all to describe, rather, your experiences of new frontiers. Yeah, so I can this is, Jeff, again, maybe kick it off for us personally. One of the keynote speakers was at New Frontiers this year. And they change each year. The theme is different, or each six months. But was Johan Rockstrom. He's a notable climate change scientist. And for us, particularly because we're working on clean energy and we've been engaged in that for probably the last 20 years, it was just sort of a reawakening of what's important and what we need to get done. So that was great in terms of re-energizing, getting inspired, and then meeting the various folks who we could connect with to start our venture off. So it was like a shot in the arm from an imagination perspective, and also just motivation, and then also shot in the arm just in terms of getting to know some of the local folks who could be part of our venture. And I will say the other really good thing, which I grew to understand over time, is there is a mix of internationals and Kiwis, and incredibly important to have that mix, because many of the Kiwi entrepreneurs have been at it for a while. And they can sort of give you a sense of how things work locally. So I think that's super valuable having them as part of the cohort. Anyone else? Reflections on New Frontiers? This also applies a little bit to Welcome Week, but it's good to know if you're coming into these events for the first time. A large portion of the days of New Frontiers and Welcome Week is kind of considered co-created or emergent, meaning there are big blocks of time where it's going to be up to you and the other attendees to decide what will be discussed and in what configurations, how big a group and for how long. So if you're from an area that already does un-conferences and kind of rapid informal gatherings, that might not be new. But culturally, it seems that in each cohort there are a number of people that arrive maybe thinking that it will be more of a passive intaking of information. And it's very active. So whatever you do to prepare yourself to share the things that concern you, the questions that you have, will be rewarded by the structure of those events. You'll have a time to host a discussion and to see who shows up to be in that discussion with you. Yeah, just I'd echo that as well. And one thing that is fantastic about it is those breakout discussions with large numbers of very values aligned people. I mean, a lot of the speakers that come to New Frontiers are fantastic and inspiring, but you can see the presentations on TED Talks or YouTube pretty easily. So it really is the discussions that break out following those sessions that the magic really happens. Great, well, we have a question from one of our participants asking about motivated fellows that we have here on the call to apply for EHF compared to other fellowships. And what pattern are you in? I'm happy to. Versus other options, sorry. I'm happy to speak to that. Andre, it's Ellie here. So from my side, the New Zealand piece was the main attractor. The fact that there was something that would embed me within New Zealand, within a network within New Zealand that also shares my vision and my values, was really unique. I appreciate other fellowships, but they're not usually so grounded within a place. And I had been looking to come to New Zealand and contribute to New Zealand for some time. But as a social entrepreneur, I really didn't find an easy way in. So I found myself having funny discussions with people who had immigrated to New Zealand successfully as other tradespeople who were not doing impact work, saying, well, I'm a banker. I'm working here. I'm a chef. I'm working. Why can't you get in? You're doing all this impact work in Africa. And it just is really special to have found a group, a community, that sees the value in a global community embedded in a place that shares its vision and its values in order to solve those global problems. Not that we're not going to be presumptuous and try to lend a hand where we're planted and help in New Zealand as well, but it would be presumptuous to say that any of us from the outside have any idea how to contribute in a meaningful way until we learn a good deal about the country that is hosting us and the culture. And we will indeed always be on that path. So from my side, from my own work, I could see the value of being based here. And I work a lot around gender issues, around innovation and technology issues. And I do a lot of work in that way. And so New Zealand was a sweet spot because that's already an industry here. That's already a community here that is absolutely thriving and a diverse community that is absolutely thriving. Any additions to that? Yeah, we had visited New Zealand a couple of times. So we had a sense of how great a country it would be to live and work in. So there was definitely just a pure geographic attraction there. But then also, I think with the EHF program, as we understood it initially and as we grew to understand it better, it's really about getting immigration right, if you will. And so Ellie had mentioned about embedding a lot of elements of Maori culture and getting folks in the welcome week to understand, to some degree, the impact that immigration would have on New Zealand. And it's the idea behind EHF to make sure that people understood the context into which they were entering and how they could be of service and how they could make sure that they were creating a valuable contribution, I think was super helpful. Because so often when you come to a new place, those are the questions that you can't ask you're concerned about. And EHF answers many of those questions and creates a safe space for you to ask the question. So I think that was an initial attraction that we could see a little bit from the outside. But really once we got in was when we understood, wow, this is really teeing people up to be successful, not just in terms of, gee, I can make my business run from here, but how I can be successful in sort of a larger social context and not make any grievous missteps along the way. Cool. And this is anything else from others to add to that? Maybe if we skip in next to the topic of what is informal collaboration with other fellows? Like maybe if there are any stories you've got of meaningful collaborations with other fellows. Yeah, Ellie and I just started collaborating on this call. So Ellie was talking about a project that she was working on and then we're based in Northland as well. And we're obviously working with the energy companies. And so there's a possibility in terms of the work that Ellie's doing and the work that we're doing where we could combine and figure out, OK, how can we provide clean, resilient energy to some of the communities that Ellie's working with. So those kinds of collaborations sort of pop up all the time. And particularly because so many of the ventures are, well, they're all impact ventures. But there are definitely links between all of those different impacts. And you get to see those links as soon as you start to understand the folks work. I'll share a give and a take. Firstly, on the give, in the last year or so I've been in the program. I've had calls with a number of people within my cohort in particular just around structuring ventures, raising capital, legal structures in New Zealand. And obviously being a Kiwi and knowing the landscape, that's a really great way to add value to this program and to be able to point them in the direction of really values aligned people with and the professional services networks, for example, in New Zealand or potential funding sources. And there's been a great way to contribute. On the take side, as a venture fund, and for me being relatively new to the venture landscape I'm an investment banking background, having guys from the Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures and a number of other of the high profile VCs from around the world. It's been fantastic just to sit down, pick their brains, heading up to San Fran in about a month and a half's time. And those guys have been fantastic, just lining up meetings for me. So it's great to see and be able to give and take. And then from the investor's perspective, also looking at angles to co-invest and share DDD and deal flow and the momentum and the Vista stream, I have to say it's probably been slower than we would have liked, but the wheels are starting to move now. I'd say within the New Zealand ecosystem in particular. So if you come in with your project from whatever country, that's one thing. But if at the course of over the course of meeting people here, moving here, being at new frontiers, if there are local initiatives that you get interested in plugging into or things that you start to consider spinning up in Aotearoa, the network is so good at connecting you immediately to people at great levels in government, in foundations, in education systems, in media, the people that you need to talk to to kind of orient around your idea and troubleshoot right up front with the design of it, like who should be at the table. Do you have the right connections to Maori leadership when that's appropriate? How are you bringing in different stakeholders? Like the knowledge of the New Zealand ecosystem and the willingness to connect you to the right people in those early stages of ideation around projects of any kind is great. I mean, I've never found it easier to kind of test drive ideas and quickly refine them to figure out whether they're a fit or not. It's one of the best things. Thanks, Fitnate. So I've got a couple of questions from the participants which I'm keen to cover off. First one I can take and then the second one I'll pass it over. So first question is, we'd like to know if your company's considered creating global impact. I'll rephrase that. I'd like to know if my company is considered to create global impact. Who could I consult about this? So in short, we're interested in people who have projects that are likely to lead to large economic, social, cultural, and environmental outcomes. So if you're working on a project that's gonna lead to significant positive outcomes, then that's how we'd think about global impact. And we think about it in terms of scale. So you know how many people could it affect, but also in terms of depth as well and also in terms of how innovative the work that you'll be doing is. So I hope that that answers that question there. And next up, we have another question asking, how's year two and three different from year one? What sort of milestones in your project should you hit for the fellowship in each year? So maybe I'll just cover the milestones piece. So what we expect to fellows is to be active members of the community. People come with ideas, come with plans. But we're also aware that things change over time. Plans need to evolve. So it's not that we at the EHF have, you need to meet these targets, meet these milestones to continue as part of the fellowship. But we're here to help support and be with you on your journey as that evolves as well. I noticed that we're relatively early in, in terms of we welcomed our first cohort in I think it was October last year. So I guess we're just kind of early stages, but any thoughts from fellows here about, and a bunch of us, three out of four of you are from cohort one, any thoughts around how the fellowship has evolved and over the time that you've been part of EHF? That's a really thoughtful question. For me, I would say it's going to be different depending on whether the fellows are Kiwi fellows who are already here and whether the international fellows have an intention to move permanently to Aotearoa New Zealand because that's a big shift, it's a big move and that's my situation. So I've lived here for the last, it's going on about a year through the fellowship and the community of the cohort has of course also grown. We had about half of the first cohort like up to far North after the first welcome week. And so people have had a chance to visit each other at this point to connect, to have phone calls, with a really active WhatsApp group where we're always sending photos and meeting up when we're in cities. So that sense of togetherness, and again it goes back to this idea of the shared vision and values, this idea that it's up to us to use our work to be of service to create a better world and that is enough to bring us together because we've also found that New Zealand is also a really good way to bind us in terms of that shared community, that shared culture and that shared idea of building that more beautiful world our hearts know it's possible like Charles Eisenstein links to talk about. So actually to have a cohort of people who reflect that to me when I call them and say, hey, can I talk to you about my project? And I spoke to Chris many times, I actually spoke to Chris on some very pivotal conversations last year, deciding how to go about what I was doing and to know that I have a very, very diverse and very healthy network of people who are willing to stand by me and support me. Is it an exceptional privilege? And I'd say I only expect that to get better because we're literally multiplying. I don't even know of very many people from cohort two and I'm looking forward to cohort three, so it's just getting started. Any other thoughts? Yeah, I think it's pretty dynamic in terms of when we, between when we applied and even welcome week, there was an election in New Zealand and then there's, so there's now a bunch of new initiatives around zero carbon, a lot of the electric companies have sort of changed their view in a sense of what it means to provide clean power. And so almost, you know, when we were applying we had one sort of framing of what things would look like and now that's starting to change in a very positive direction. So just in terms of you might go in with a project idea, our concept hasn't changed, but how we might execute is definitely shifting as we meet with more players on the ground and as the sort of overall theme changes. And then certainly the support that we get from the folks in the cohort is super helpful, just in terms of, you know, inspiration and seeing what everyone else is doing and encouragement. So as Ellie says, I think it will really strengthen particularly as we build with additional cohorts. Okay, here's a question for the group. If you had to describe what the culture of your cohort is, how would you describe it? What is the, I know, what's the culture of the EHF amongst the fellows? Definitely supportive would be my one word answer. I'd kind of identify the shared vision. We all have big problems that burn on our hearts that we wanna solve. And the other thing is very much is a culture of action as well. I think a lot of these big problems are easy to talk about, but actually taking steps towards trying to solve them is one thing that everyone in the cohort shares. People are pretty socially generous as well. You definitely see that when fellows travel to countries where other fellows still are based, there's a real big tendency of people to link up and to do the work of building friendships with each other. Like I've seen a real willingness of folks in the community to do that. Another one, okay, so if you're giving advice to anyone who joins as a new fellow, like we've got a bunch of cohort three people, fellows, they'll be welcomed to the country for welcome week and new frontiers in October, November. Any advice of people who become fellows? Like what should you know about how to get the most out of being an EHF fellow? Oh, wow, I would say before you come to welcome week, see if you can get some connections to people in New Zealand and start talking to them before you arrive.  Occasionally I meet like 100 people in a day, you are going to get overwhelmed because the quality of the curation of people who come to the new frontiers event is extremely high. It's a definitely, I mean, it's a very special event.  No, not like that. Just follow some people on Facebook or Twitter who interest you, get to know the environment that you're coming into and ask for introductions and have some social calls with people. Because one of the things I love about Kiwi business culture and I'm just learning, but it's how relational it is, how much it is about who you are in a community and in a network of people and what you give to that community. So as you come into that, you'll get a sense for that and be welcomed very warmly and knowing a few people and who they are and what they've been up to is always a nice way to begin to orient because you will be welcomed warmly. You can expect that for sure. Just to add to that, I just wanna say something that came up last webinar, that New Zealand is small. So it will be most likely that you will be able to have a quick coffee with a CEO of any company or a quick chat or something like that. Or someone will know someone that can introduce to you so you can get to know that person. So it's super easy in that way. And I guess that's why the entrepreneurial space in New Zealand is learning on relationships. And to that end, I would say sort of the quicker you let your guard down in terms of the sort of your business persona, the quicker you'll be able to connect with people and sort of the faster you'll kind of understand what the program is about. And any thoughts about, we've talked about moving to New Zealand, but any thoughts for people who are interested in moving to New Zealand? What should they be aware of? Like what are the good things and the challenging things about moving your life and your work to New Zealand? Yeah, it takes planning. It's more expensive than you would think. And also those expenses can be mitigated with the help of the community. So don't let the fact that it appears quite that the cost of living can be quite high deter you from actually making that move. Reach out to people, especially the cost of living, renting when you're first trying to decide where to go. There's a lot of ways that you can land here and explore where you might wanna be that aren't like fully committing right away. They give you a chance to get to know where you'd wanna land. And then they also let you make the transition with the resources that you need. Because it does actually, I would say the quality of life here is so high.   Christchurch, Wellington or Auckland. And it's like they've ruled out in advance all the rest of the country. And there are amazing places scattered around Aotearoa where you could find and put down routes and be very accessible to a city if you need it. But the other reason to consider taking some time traveling around looking at the rest of the country is that the government of New Zealand is very interested in particular in helping to develop some of the areas outside of the cities. If your initiative is gonna be of help to more rural areas, you may well find a lot more support.  So if you've got the temperament for a more rural way, have a look. You're gonna find a really lively, intelligent, active, woke, liberal, like a rural scene that you should put on your list of potentials. I think there is a number of folks from our cohort who either rented a van or a caravan and traveled around just to see what was going on or are intending to do that as they move over so they would move, land, then travel around and then make a decision. And deciding between, as Nate says, do I wanna be right in the middle of the city is an hour away adjacent but in a rural area good or do I wanna be in an area that's actually quite far from cities and then do, because that's the best place to kind of get grounded in a community and do the community work. So I think the thing would be to say, give yourself some time and leeway. It's an opportunity to say, hey, I'm gonna take three weeks a month just to look around and make sure that where I land is really where I feel I can be most successful. For us, we had actually been on holiday on both the North and South Island and so we already had a pretty good sense of where we wanted to be. So I think doing that sort of reconnaissance or tourism you decide is a good approach. Thanks Jeff. So I'm just gonna put a question out to the fellows and then I'm gonna answer a couple of questions from the Q and A and then we'll come back to the fellows with the question. So the question for the fellows to think about it for a minute is, what did you expect of EHF when you applied back however long ago that was? Like what was your picture of what EHF was like? And then secondly, second part of that question, how's it been different to what you expected? So just leave you to think about that. I'm just gonna go to a couple of questions we've got in the Q and A box. So one question is, are all the ventures based in New Zealand? And then the second question is, is everyone really have a venture when they join? So those two are related so we'll kind of cover those up together. So some people will start a new venture in New Zealand. Some people have a venture that they're built overseas that they bring to New Zealand. And for some people they, for some fellows they're still planning on spending a bunch of their time outside of New Zealand but to connect them with New Zealand through being here for part of the time of the year or through investing into New Zealand businesses or through connecting their networks to New Zealand parties that can help them do their mission. So I hope that answers those questions. But back to the fellows, what did you expect when you first applied and then how's it been different? I think one thing just to put out there is globally there are a lot of fellowships that come with a certain amount of funding or a certain level of ease of access to funding. And so if you don't really read carefully about EHF and you come in and you think that there's like a commitment of EHF to either give you money or immediately help you get money, that's not the primary consideration of the fellowship. It's much more about a community of action about willing to make introductions and ally with you on the mission that you're on. So just make sure that you understand it is not like a cash-based or a commitment to support you financially type fellowship. That's not something you wanna be confused about. I've previously lived in multiple countries and sort of on a long-term basis and then actually gone through immigration process to the US. And one of my expectations was gee, how hard was the visa processing going to be and how sort of a onerous that might be. And I was blown away with sort of the welcoming of the folks from the visa office, both just in terms of applying for the visa, answering questions and then also during Welcome Week they came out and talked to us and it was just a very welcoming experience which may not be the case for all other countries. So that was I think a big switch for me. I didn't really have any expectations coming into it. To be honest, I got attracted by the caliber of the people who were establishing the program and that kind of drew me into it. The thing that's been probably most surprising is the quality of the people. I'd say, and I don't mean that in terms of what they look like on paper because you obviously expect that to be a very high standard but as actual people it's not a professional feel amongst the cohort at all it very much is a guard down friendship type community. And the way we interact very much is on that sort of level rather than it being a professional network and type per type community. Could anyone give any specific, sorry not any thoughts around how they've seen how they're helping each other out at a personal level and without giving specifics or names or anything but just kind of an archetypal example of how people help each other out at a personal level. Sure, I mean even in our last cohort get together we were designing the agenda for the day on the fly and there were a number of people who put their hands up to effectively have their business or the project or their venture, whatever it was, broken down and critiqued and they spoke very honestly about the challenges they were facing and in the room with them were 10, 15 people, many of whom have faced challenges similar to those before so were able to sympathize and add value to their business not only in kind of a technical capacity but also at a personal level about the rollercoaster you face when you're taking on big challenges like that and there's been plenty of examples like that. Yeah, I think the safe space discussions during welcome week where there's sort of small groups, maybe six people and people could share their challenges and some folks had sort of real problems they were working through real time and they almost felt like, gee, I can't take the time to go to welcome week, I've got to fix this thing that's going on with my business and coming there and their reflection was, gee, it's great just to be able to speak candidly to people who care, who can empathize, who can provide advice and that really helped them sort of think through their particular challenges and they basically said, I was better off spending the time at welcome week with other fellows thinking this through than trying to grind through on my own back in their venture. So just a note to participants for any other questions you've got, we've got about eight more minutes before we need to wrap up the course if you have any more questions, feel free to pass them through and we'll put them to the fellows. One thing I'm keen to ask before that, however, is just about what it's like for people including their life partners with them as part of the fellowship. So a bunch of people who become fellows come with their family, come with their life partner and so just any reflections from what people have seen of bringing or connecting in their family because for a number of people thinking around how a move will fit for their family is an important consideration as well. I'm actually quite fortunate. So my partner is actually a partner in the venture as well and has worked in a very similar space. So for us, it's a pretty natural fit. We're based in San Francisco and we actually saw one of our fellows just by happenstance on the streets of San Francisco passing through and he and his wife and two daughters were moving and then later I saw them at San Francisco International Airport and they had these big giant bags and a look of excitement and concern on their face. So I think, but they've really been supported by EHF in terms of the move where they're gonna stay when they land and then looking for how to move into the community. So I think they took probably four or five months to figure out their move plan and the welcome week, the ongoing relationship with other fellows, particularly the Kiwi fellows was really helpful in helping them get comfortable about the move. It was really noticeable in cohort one and I heard the same from cohort two that the invitation to a fellow to bring along his or her partner is it's incredibly sincere and it's incredibly comprehensive. It actually purges on like an expectation of real engagement. So like if your partner comes along to the welcome week, they're gonna be included in 75% of the activities as if they were a fellow. The cohort will end up knowing a great deal about them and in the small number of instances when they're not included, they'll have a parallel activity with other partners that's also well thought out and of high value. So if anything, partners that are thinking, oh, I can just kind of float in and out of the event will be surprised at how genuinely they are pulled into the community and the community is also super kid and child positive. Like you'll see children of different ages like floating around. So if that's a concern or something that's important to you, you should know that there's a real child friendliness in the community as well. I just wanna add, so someone in Zoom raised their hand, not sure exactly what that means, but if you have a question, then add it into the Q and A. And one other question for the group is why New Zealand for you?  Somebody who works and continues to work in Africa, which is where I think we're really gonna see amazing growth and progress and amazing things happen over the coming decades. New Zealand to me is also one of the places in the world that has so much lined up for its future that is really putting it in a space to be able to affect positive change in a really unique and interesting way. For me, that's because of the, what it's doing in its legal system and in its government in terms of protecting the rights of nature, in terms of the progressive things that it's doing for survivors of intimate partner violence for just general cool stuff. And it's very much like a bicultural society, I would say a multicultural society now, but legally, because of the Treaty of Waitangi, there are some very interesting things in New Zealand that if you're interested in social justice, if you're interested in restorative justice and you're interested in doing social business and kind of social projects that work within an indigenous framework that can happen here in an amazing way. And coming from the US, as you can probably tell by my accent, that's not the case. A lot of the times the government is not set up in a way to be able to work with indigenous people. So if that is something that's interesting and it is to me, it's part of my work and my service. This is an amazing opportunity to come and learn and to inform my own work. So that's what it was for me. Also giving the rights of nature to places, that New Zealand is such a leader. And so because innovations can scale from here very easily, I wanted to be a part of that. Any other thoughts on my New Zealand? If not, that's okay. Oh, no, no, that had been so eloquent. I didn't want to even add to it or attempt to. But I think for us, apart from just liking the country and the people, one of the things that was very apparent was the ease of doing business in New Zealand just from the few transactions that we did. And that was sort of, it just felt really good to be able to get business done relatively simply and straightforward. So that was an attraction. Fantastic. Well, we're almost at the hour, so I'm gonna wrap up the call now. But I'd just like to say thank you so much for everyone for joining us. And just a reminder as well, I'm linking back to what I mentioned earlier in the call that the early bird deadline for cohort four closes and now it's about 10 hours. And the applications for cohort four close on the 2nd of September. So if you think it would be a good fit for you, then we encourage you to apply. And once again, thank you for making the time.


So I'm going to take a few minutes this morning to talk a little bit about business and specifically invoicing. So I have some invoices pulled up here on the screen. Now my background is working in IT for 22 years, but for a while I was the IT director, CTO, however you want to title me. I basically managed IT for a large Ford supplier in the supply chain management. So I had to make a lot of IT decisions and contractors and dealing with all the things related to that. I always appreciated simplistic invoices, not ones with lots of complicated line item abbreviated parts on them, so I was always confused about things. Either the invoice was clear or it wasn't. The scope of work should explain in detail because IT can be a very complicated thing. I need that scope of work to explain the details of things, but when it comes down to the invoice it needs to be simplistic and I need to understand what I'm paying for and what I'm getting so I can write the check. So I took that same concept when I started my business in 2003 and started making my invoices really simple and concise. So maybe a scope of work and engagement that gets me going with the client so we understand everything needs to be done and especially when it's a complicated build or task related to IT, but in the end we keep our invoicing very, very clean and simple. And for example, this right here is what it looks like for us to go install five CAD 5E drops. Then one phone line and reroute a CAD 5E line to reuse on a panel. They had a giant mess. We moved the mess around. There's a flat rate charger and as a two hour charge to clean up the mess. Now I keep all the rates out of here because they're not relevant. They're going to vary greatly by where you live and I almost look at them like the housing prices. If you're in a very well off area where everything else is, everything else is a lot more expensive, then your rates will reflect that. The rates are kind of a reflection of the area and it's like housing prices. There's a lot of variation in what you pay because cost of living and et cetera, et cetera. So I have the rates off of here, but you kind of get the idea of the simplicity of it. So here's what our remote service calls look like. Mailware, virus removal, root kit removal, load antivirus, remove someone wants to junkware and toolbars. One hour of labor, it was actually really simple. Testing it from a browser working property.  And once again, really simple invoice and they paid it. No problem. Here's what a managed one would look like. So here's our, we have a rate per workstation and we do a lot of these small businesses managed to client deals. So they only have three workstations and we gave them a rate per month to manage these workstations. We keep it very clean as to what we're applying. So we have persistent remote workstation access by Lawrence Technologies. That is, we load our remote software and we're very clear and up front about that. That way when they call us, which very quick for us to service. We offer patch management, antivirus daily updates and web filtering, keeping all the browsers up to date. Chrome, Firefox, Adobe Flash, and Java. Monitor the hard drive status. They also have backups from us. We just back up their server and keep full 20 days of retention on site and off site. And then we daily monitor, make sure these backups are working. We do verifications on them. We have our whole process for this, but they don't really care about the details. I want to make sure that we're doing it. They know it's the line item on the bill and says we're doing it. Then our billable services, remote support build in 15 minute increments. Problems solve under 15 minutes are free. And this is part of our hybrid system that we sell to a lot of small businesses that don't really want the expense of a full managed service. It's not really in the budget for them, but they want to be able to call someone and say my printer doesn't work and have us fix it. So we have a monthly fee we attach and most of the problems we solve in less than 15 minutes are not billed. Provided those problems don't require any hardware or us to visit them on site, which the majority of them are they call us the printer's not printing or outlook is not responding for whatever reason. And we remove it. We have a client that randomly out of the 17 workstations they have, one of the plugins for outlook that's for the thing they use just breaks. We have got it down to a science in less than a minute. We can remove and restart that plugin and fix outlook. Those the clients happy. They're not billed for those random occurrences that occur. We get an overall good picture of their health of their network because we're keeping everything up to date and it works out good for everybody. Then we do have an onsite service call. So if we come out, there's a bill for that. But like I said, this is a really simple for our managed services of how easy we make it for our clients. We try to keep the billing down to one page. Now, here's a much bigger job, but you can see there's still not a lot on here. So we needed to install 122 cat six drops from the terminal room to the workstations and install a customer provided Ruckus access point. You know, then we installed test and label 122 plates and keystones, clear the equipment from the previous room walls. They actually had a dead server room that we repurposed. All the wires were cut. So we actually got to rip everything off the wall. It was actually pretty easy. We took down the old board and installed a new one. It just we put a brand new fiberboard on and we didn't have to reuse anything which made everyone really happy because there really wasn't that much to do. In terms of that, and then we ran one fiber optic cable to the D mark for AT&T to the com room. And these are our larger projects. I mean, this was in the $20,000 range for all the work, but you can see one single invoice scope of work and building layout was part of the back end, which planned this. We had an entire blueprint of the building. We labeled out where they wanted everything. We worked with the general contractor because this was a during construction and all this was put in while they were building up the building, while gutting and remodeling an existing building. But when it comes down to the invoice, the client had no problem paying it. They were clear. We had all the engagement worked out and now this one short, almost half page invoice is almost $20,000 worth of things that were done. So you kind of get the ideas. I love keeping things really simple. It just makes everything a lot easier. Now, some clients do like detail. This client loves detail and they lot everything we did while we were there documenting so we don't have a problem with that. And as you notice, we kind of keep our system free form. So this was done across five hours of time there, setting up new computers. They had them drive to Micro Center and we told them that's all billable and they didn't do any planning. They just bought stuff and asked us to come out and do it. We don't mind break fixed clients like that. We end up sometimes they're kind of unpredictable occasionally because they call us and like, Hey, we got new computers. We'll be here tomorrow. Can you come in the next day and install them? We say sure. And we're kind of don't know because everything's kind of haphazard there. How many hours it'll be, but the clients find just to pay whatever. We have an hourly rate. They're aware of it and they're fine to pay it and make all this happen. So I just want to go over this though because it's a question I get people asking about their starter business. How do I do invoicing? Keep it simple. Make sure you have clear scopes of work. So the client and you have some documentation behind this to what you're doing. If it's necessary, it may not be some of our clients. We hardly have even a scope of work with them. It's kind of like just come out and do a thing, especially the ones we have long term relationships with, which you have a lot of car dealerships now and they don't even ask for detail. They just say come out. Here's we need 50 drops installed at this new wing of the building we did or come redo our mechanics bay. They just put little post it notes on the wall. That's that's the documentation and we know where the com room is. It's not that complicated. Sometimes people overthink it. Sometimes people overdo it and I'm all for the keep it simple. Just overall you'll find you have better interaction. There's a lot of clarity. When this arrives at the accounting office at whoever's going to pay your bill, the people in charge of that at the business. Even if it's a larger company, they look at it one page, not a multi page of what is all this stuff. It's clear. This is what we came here to do. That's what we did and it was simple for them to read. So they pay it if they have questions. They can call us. We keep notes behind the scenes, you know, as we need them. But keeping your invoicing simple will make everyone's life easier and hopefully get your bills paid faster, which I'm actually pretty shocked right now. We have in this system that we're using over looking over the other side here offscreen 20,119 invoices. I've only ever had a couple people not pay me. We're fighting with one of them right now and they're a church that just doesn't like paying their bills and they have all kinds of issues. So we've got them and we've got one other guy. That's out of 20,000 invoices. So I complained about these people that owe us some money. But the other side of it is there's really not that many people for how much, along as I've been in business, I can only come up with a couple people that owe me money. Now that being said, it does add up all these people that owe me money and I'm looking at the numbers over here. So that is something you have to stay on top of. But having your invoicing system being very clear will help you in the long run and it helps everyone involved. The questions with the church, for example, is not about the invoice at all. It's everything of, we don't have the money right now and I'm not going to get into a rant about them, but they really, they're a mega church with the money. They certainly just find reasons of, they basically tell us every time we're there we're going to pay next week and we've been coming next week for three months. And we didn't want to get lawyers involved, but sometimes you have to do that in business to get your invoices collected, usually just a legal letter and knock on wood. I've never, ever in 20,000, 100,000 invoices, ever had anything go to court. Usually you just say the L word and people go, I guess I'll pay you and they don't even owe me that much money. So it's like they owe me a couple hundred dollars. That's it. And they've just, yeah, some people are like that.  You know, I like, if I'm wrong, just tell me why I'm wrong. If you like the content here, like and subscribe. If you have some suggestions for improvement or anything like that, let me know. If you want some other business topics covered, email me, Tom at LawrentSystems.com. I've been trying to remember to put my email into description. I'm easy to get ahold of, easy to find. You can tweet me. You can message YouTube messaging. I really want to reply to all the messages. YouTube's not always easy to reply to all the messages because they kind of get lost in shuffle because I have so many of them coming in. It's not that I don't want to reply. It's that YouTube hasn't made it, the new update is better, but they haven't made it as good as I'd like it to be to reply to all the messages. And some things seem to end up in the clutter spam because I have so many spammers that want to comment on videos that they start. Yeah, that's a whole nother topic. They need to work on that. You know, I'm sure they're working on it. This is not an easy task to tackle. So once again, thanks for watching.


Words of the Boys Training Centre, BTC, coupled with students of the new beginnings transit home, have embraced the creative art of mural painting, following hands-on training from artists affiliated with the French embassy in St. Lucia. This round the taking was rolled out from November to December 2022 with the intention of helping to forge a calm, peaceful and positive atmosphere for participants from the collaborative agencies. The mural is located along a section of the Julian Arhant Highway in Marysield opposite courts. Extremely satisfied with the outcome is the manager of the Boys Training Centre, Wang Son Son, who emphasized the significance of the mural art venture in building in BTC wards a sense of ownership and pride. We saw this as a fitting initiative as it would beautify the community and we wanted the boys to be part of an activity that would give back to the community. I'm sure that everyone will see that this mural really uplifted the aesthetics of the place and the boys themselves gained a lot from the experience and they have a sense of ownership. So it showed them that instead of using art to, in most cases, in some cases, deface the environment. They can use it to uplift the environment. Manager of the Boys Training Centre, Wang Son Son. Through public art, the hope is that teen artists will acquire the skills, interest and determination to become leaders in their homes, school and community. In addition, a recent hypothesis from a re-owned United States based mural artist suggests that being exposed to images of nature have a rejuvenating impact on one's mental health. If it's English, it's the manager of the new beginnings transit home. It was a very interesting project because it provided our young folks, our children with the skills, the relevant skills in doing the different art forms and we were able to, along with the Boys Training Centre, come together and to do this very beautiful mural which is an open view to the public in the Maricel area. Inglises of the view that having students create mural designs on people and bringing them to fruition along with sharing their stories of overcoming obstacles can build empathy and social awareness. According to mural art participant from the Boys Training Centre. I love painting, it means a lot to me but I believe that not only me that should have been taking part, I mean like other young men, they've been taking part too because it means a lot it shows your life mentality, the way you rush the world, the way your life sometimes will go, that way it will grow in the future and bring images, something I love. Mural art participant from the BTC. Public art projects can benefit a child's well-being by combating feelings of anxiety and social isolation. Reporting from the Ministry of Equity, Social Justice and Empowerment, Jovroy Marius.


Excuse me, dude. Would you have any rum? No, please. I just don't like it. Hey, welcome back to our studio director's unit, some Corbin. I'm... ...sure. And you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter, talk about... ...sure. ...sure. ...sure. ...sure. ...sure. ...sure. ...sure. ...sure. ...sure. ...sure. ...sure. ...sure. Oh, so I got it with Tisha's crossствие. Today we are reacting to a live performance song. Who is it? Who's singing it? Who's doing it? I don't know. Can you read the... ...basically the title, or the whole all of it? Yes. I don't know what any of those words mean. The whole all of it. What we see first, is Mala-Guel and then we see... And it's it says Tamil and Moalium as the languages I was just to language I was gonna say those words didn't seem to be phonetically Hindi But this is Harish I can't say that name Shiva Ramakashran Is a popular karnatic musician not bad and a frontman for Agam Agam is a Bangalore based contemporary karnatic progressive rock band. Oh, that's awesome The band wow the band was formed in the year 2003 Cool. I'm all for some rock man But did you combine the words rock and karnatic? Yeah Dude look a forward to it never experienced never experienced that before three two one We don't have subs for this part NINRI VALINI RU MALAKAADE YANRA MAIRIKYAADE YANDA ANANOOT RANDA EDE YANNA KALA VA EDE YANNA NINAYA URUGI EDE PERUGI YANAYA SAROVIM SANDRA MAAM AADAM ANDRA MUNARTHUM LOLASALA URU GODI SOURYA VANI THERDIM THELI VANIL MELLAYU YARAN This line is not possible to repeat The composer of this song is going to be killed if he doesn't say a word That's how it's going to be URU GODI SOURYA VANI THERDIM THELI VANIL MELLAYU YARAN SHISHIRAM PAKARUM PANINI YARMALAYU VERUDE NALU NANAYU YARAN EDE YANNA KALA VA EDE YANNA KALA VA EDE YANNA KALA VA EDE YANNA KALA VA I wish we had subs for that one Yeah, me too I wish we knew what he was singing I think that would have made a huge, huge difference Yeah, we didn't have subs, sorry guys But yeah, it was really pretty It's just obviously they were cheering at times And I don't know if that's because they just knew what he was about to sing Or what he just sang But it would have been nice to know that Because it sounded like a really pretty song That I'm sure had beautiful, beautiful lyrics But yeah, so sorry about that But he looked really, really cool though I loved his look I almost wish I didn't know That they were quote-unquote rock and roll band I was waiting I thought the opening of it was like an intro And I was waiting for the rock and roll song to kick in And to somehow blend a rock song Versus and chromatic music They probably have other that are more That style But the one that I was sent was This one, which has almost nine million views I'm wondering if it's like a A lot of times that people sing like almost religious songs And that's what it sounded like Like almost like a hymn style And it was really pretty He has a really good voice Yeah, he has a beautiful voice I just wish I knew what he said That's because this sounds like one of those songs That you really need to appreciate the lyrics of it To really get a feel for it I loved it, he had the crazy awesome hair And then the full sleeve of tats on it both The first time I've seen that Maybe want to get more tats I need to get a new tattoo I know, I so badly want to get some new tattoos I guess it's not the best time Not really Not opening the tattoo parlors just yet I don't think those are essential businesses Right now It may feel like that to us Well, let us know more from this band That it almost blends the Carnatic and the rock style Because we're both big fans of classic rock Led Zeppelin and Carnatic music And so if we can blend those And see that, I would love to see that I think that's one of the areas we haven't explored It really is Indian rock We haven't explored it very much at all I remember one reaction that we did And they were not, I forgot what part of India they were from It was not a Hindi band Anyway, yeah, we need, we've done rap And hip-hop, but we need, we need I would love to hear some rock and roll bands from India That is new


Jesus says neither do I condemn you. I wonder if sometimes the places that just have this part of the verse don't mention This is because we first condemn you and then tell you to go and say no more But that is not how it works because somebody say amen. I'm gonna share with you two simple thoughts from this message one is Jesus gives a mirror to those without mercy Because we can't be merciful without a mirror I want you to see in this story two kinds of people one category is the accusers and the other category is the accused and Jesus ministers to both kinds of people But Jesus doesn't give mercy to the accusers. He only gives mercy to the accused To people who are the accusers who are doing the accusing. He gives them something else He gives them a mirror Why? Because only Jesus can be merciful without being reminded of his past all of us we can't be merciful That's why the Bible says forgive as you have been forgiven love as you have been loved Why because God makes himself a reference to our behavior to a humankind We cannot be kind toward people if we first have not learned of God's kindness toward us We don't have the capacity inside of us to be nice We don't have the capacity inside of us when somebody mistreats us not to punch them back It's not within us and therefore the only way we can be kind toward others is if Jesus gives us a mirror to remind us How merciful he has been how good he has been and how we have fallen before and he didn't throw a stone in our face And this is how Jesus healed the accusers See the goal of Jesus is to take the stone out of every accuser and give him a mirror Because every time see most of us know that the grace of God is not an excuse to sin But the righteousness of God is not an excuse to condemn Many people when they get better in life when they overcome certain addiction overcome certain sin achieve certain goal They feel like they have been promoted to this new job which Satan put on for hire called accusation accused accusers and the accused are part of the devil's plan and And when you lived your life being accused live your life being condemned lived your life being looked down Shamed and embarrassed by people for the things you've done What happens is there comes a moment you beat that thing that caused you to be so accused and you get Elevated to something higher in the kingdom of the devil called the accuser When you're no longer being accused you're now privileged to do the accusing yourself Becoming the devil's right hand But it feels good because you're now in control it feels good because you have stones and you have targets and Jesus helps the accusers First he doesn't help the woman first he helps the accusers first By taking away their stones and the way he takes them away is he offers them a mirror He says anybody without sin throw the first stone and What happened he put a mirror in front of them and when a person looked in the mirror they realized I'm not much better and the stone dropped and The stone dropped and the stone dropped now. We don't stone people today We don't have stones we have words and Most of you whoever had words thrown your way you know that it would have been better if you throw a stone in my face Because words hurt deeper than stones Words can kill a person words start wars Wars words they create conflict in families Words can make a small problem in marriage become an issue of divorce Words can belittle a person a shame a person make person feel below carpet words They're the stones What they did yes what they did in that generation when somebody committed sin is they through stones We do in our houses every day When somebody comes in and makes a sin and maybe not as bad sin as this woman where she committed adultery But we immediately find stones and because we've never done this We feel like it gives us the right not to be because we're not the accused But we become the accusers not knowing that is not the job of the Holy Spirit Holy Spirit doesn't do the accusing only devil does the accusing and that is the devil's plan He wants us to be in that position to accuse people with our words with our stones and You would think Jesus would pat people on the back say hey guys.  He cannot be hold iniquity all these scriptures come up and you feel righteous in your stoning Not realizing Jesus doesn't do stoning Moses did Moses is not Jesus Moses is not God the view of God has to be defined by Jesus not by our tradition By Jesus not by our feelings for vengeance and justice The last thing we should be wanting is justice And we all want God to be holy only when somebody's sinned against us And when we do the sinning all we run for the scriptures for the mercy and the grace of God