Benji Timu

My name is Benji Timu I’m 27 years old from East Auckland, born and bred in Glen Innes. I went to Sacred Heart College, I have bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Architecture, but I’m now a filmmaker/digital content creator, and Pacific activist. Being a filmmaker enables me to tell our stories better both online and one the screen (one day).

4 years ago, me and couple of mates from the local community, same age within the youth bracket (at that time) started an organisation called No Six. No Six creates content for different organisations, particularly for social organisations, but we also create our own original content too. We have a huge library of content we’ve built up over the years because we want to be better storytellers for our people.

I’ve only recently been involved in doing things with The HEART Movement, but I have associates who are a part of HEART. My first step into doing things for HEART was the Lockdown Podcast I did last year. There was an opportunity there because I had already been doing podcasting at the time, but HEART’s Kaupapa is connecting people and healthy relationships in the community. It was about health and mental wellbeing, so my own personal values lined up with The HEART Movement’s Kaupapa.

What I enjoy the most about HEART is the constant communication in a community that’s always active, regardless of the time of year. Since joining HEART I’ve noticed that the chat (Change Agent Group Chat), literally never stops. There’s no “end of this season, let’s take a break” it’s literally all year long. All-day, every day, every morning, every night. Sometimes I need to turn the notifications off because it just keeps beeping and beeping. But what I love about it is that the community is active, and if you have any burning questions, you’re almost always guaranteed an answer from the change agents. I love that there’s a community of people and that HEART enables us to keep in touch. It was cool to map out what was going on in Tamaki.

I’m the eldest of 10 siblings. I have a mixed family, and I love each and every one of my siblings. They’re my biggest fans, and it’s special to them because I’m like this big role model but that’s just it when you’re the oldest sibling. We don’t live together, but it’s cool to always have them in my corner.

I feel like I’m just beginning to crack out of my cocoon, so I don’t feel like I have the life experience to be offering advice. But within my short time, I’ve learnt is to stay true to yourself. I know it’s really cliché, but clichés work. Stay true to yourself and everything that you do. I don’t mean to make everyone know who the Hell you are, but it’s more for you to understand who you are as a person. Only then will everything fall in its place. If you understand who you are, every decision that you make is aligned with who you are – the last thing you want to do is something because it’s on someone else’ agenda. Do it for you.