Jessica Black, a Waikato-based Economic Development Advisor, understands the importance of investing in children at the beginning of their lives, so they can go on and do amazing things. Wanting her Will to reflect her values, Jessica has decided to include a gift in her Will to the Plunket Foundation.
As one of four children raised on a rural sheep farm in Southland, Plunket played an important role in Jessica’s early life, with her mum spending hours volunteering at the local Plunket playgroup.
Jessica says, “It's really important we back organisations like Plunket who are providing grassroot community services. I gained so much from having those playgroup interactions as a child.”
Jessica admits that Plunket has only recently come back on her radar again, with some of her friends back home in Southland starting to have their own children. Jessica hears from them how much they value Plunket’s services, given how isolating rural life can be. Just knowing that her friends can rely on Plunket to help them form valuable support networks is comforting to Jessica, who would like to be there for her friends, but can’t.
As an economist and someone who thinks deeply about the world, Jessica has given a lot of thought to the challenges that whānau and tamariki face in Aotearoa today. She sees that Plunket can be a vital lifeline for families navigating the cost-of-living crisis, barriers to healthcare, and the difficulty of building ‘a village’ without whānau nearby. Jessica shares her aspirations for New Zealand’s future, “My dream for Aotearoa is to be a place where we are giving our kids and our communities the best. Plunket can absolutely play a part in that from the very beginning of someone's life - just setting them up so well has a huge impact for our community.”
The economist in Jessica also comes out when she discusses her legacy gift.
"One of the reasons why I decided to leave a gift to the Plunket Foundation is because it’s an endowment fund. The gift you leave is then invested and grown over time. I think that’s amazing because it means your gift will live on way longer than that initial donation.”
On her recent OE in South America, Jessica saw that children can easily fall through the gaps when health and wellbeing services aren’t available to them at the beginning of their lives.
She says, “Plunket’s been around for over 100 years now, doing all these grassroots, community-oriented services to support our tamariki. I’d hate to think what it’d be like without them. You can see that without those services it’s not just an impact for that particular kid or whānau at the beginning of their life, it has a massive flow on impact to society. We’re just so lucky in New Zealand to have Plunket.”
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