Last Friday I had the pleasure of talking with Sir Graeme Dingle and Lady Dingle - Jo-anne Wilkinson (pictured) who started the Graeme Dingle Foundation 30 years ago with the aim of improving the lives of young New Zealanders and helping them realise their full potential.

The Foundation works with Aotearoa New Zealand’s tamariki and rangatahi at different life stages through schools and communities, delivering life enhancing programmes that have now involved over 30,000 young people in 10 regions across the country.

One of the things that makes the Graeme Dingle Foundation special is their focus on being the fence at the top of the cliff, not the ambulance waiting at the bottom. They believe that prevention is better than cure, and their programmes are designed to empower youth to make positive choices and develop healthy habits early on in life.

While we talk about the work of the foundation in this podcast, much of our conversation is about a rugged 1200 km journey Sir Graeme undertook with six violent offenders back in 1988 and Jo- anne and Graeme’s views about how military-style Boot camps are not the way to help young people develop the resilience they need to turn their lives around.

You can find out more about the inspiring work of The Graeme Dingle Foundation here:

https://dinglefoundation.org.nz

Sir Graeme Dingle is a New Zealand outdoor adventurer and mountaineer. In 1968, Dingle and Murray Jones were the first to climb all six major European north faces and the Bonati pillar, including Eiger and Matterhorn in one season.He has achieved over 200 mountaineering and adventure firsts worldwide, including first ascents of mountains and faces in the Himalayas, the Andes, and in New Zealand.Dingle made the first traverse of the Himalayas, a distance of some 5000 km, in 265 days. He has made a 28,000 km traverse of the Arctic, the first winter traverse of the Southern Alps taking 100 days, and the first transit of the Northwest Passage by snow machine.

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