Whiti Food Fest

The Whiti Food Festival was a first time event for Mercury Bay and a great success with numbers attending, and activities and the community support. The Sunday night event, 4.00pm – 8.00pm, organised by four young women, students at Mercury Bay Area School, as part of their year 12 Business and Enterprise assignment . “The festival was our idea. “said Luscha McMiken one of the quartet. “We came up with it last year. Four of us would run this event and it would be quite a cool learning exercise. At times, we thought, ‘Is this ever going to happen?’ A lot of our other peers were doing simpler or single item projects, and we were trying to organise this whole event. But now, we want to do this again we want it to be our trademark. We have made notes on what we need to do for next year.”

One thing that the girls thought didn’t do so well was they didn’t have enough food and it was a FOOD Festival. “We will do the food better next year. “ One aspect that worked very well was people could make any donation at entry and get a raffle ticket to win the kayak. No one specified what amount was needed as a donation. It worked so very well as people were generous. DiveZone were super about the price paid for the kayak to enable the project to have such a fantastic raffle prize. “We were always worried about money, because this was a business project,” said Luscha. “We had to spend a lot and pay back quite a lot of money. All up, we made $800 in profit which for us is really good and this will largely go toward next year’s Whiti Food festival. We need to invest it next year and now we know more and we have some resources to help us next year.”

Congratulations to the team of four - Josie Fairweather, Luscha McMiken, Georgia Litherland, Elise Reader.