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WORDS/PHOTOS/JULIA WADE
Members of a local hard-working inspirational club attended a significant birthday recently, celebrating a decade of helping to improve and empower the lives of women, both nationally and worldwide.
Mangawhai Zonta, one of New Zealand’s 28 ‘District 16’ clubs of women’s advocacy organisation Zonta International, gathered at Mangawhai Golf Club on September 28 for their tenth anniversary, joined by husbands, partners and members from Whangarei and Hibiscus Coast chapters as well as Zonta dignitaries including NZ Zonta’s new governor, Desirae Kirby.
Greeted by Mangawhai Zonta president, Helen White ‘to a somewhat belated birthday celebration’ and founder/first president Liz Holsted, attendees were told the story of how the club originated despite being cautioned that ‘we would never get a club off the ground here in Mangawhai’.
The club’s path of becoming a legal entity in May 2010 also came down to the wire as membership was two-shy of the 20 required to officially register. Not to be outdone, a couple of husbands were wrangled in to the ranks to make up the numbers but ‘were let off the hook’ Holsted says when two more local women signed up.
“Welcome to a milestone that I was told we would never make,” Holsted says, a former member of North Shore Zonta. “As my club members can testify, don’t tell me I can’t do something!”
White explained to the group she met Holsted six years ago after ‘dragging her partner’ out to a local venue for a Devonshire Tea.
“We got chatting and Liz suddenly says ‘you’d make a great Zontian’, I said ‘a what?’ as I had no idea what she was talking about. After she explained she also promised to take me to the next dinner meeting,” White says. “Well, with that sort of enthusiastic coercion it is no surprise Liz got a club going in Mangawhai, and thank goodness she did… thank you all for celebrating this milestone with us.”
“The challenge now is to keep ourselves relevant for the future.”
  
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