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And Special Needs Kids in New Zealand will need to wait for someone other than Kiwibank.

Making approaches to other business with proposals of one kind or another, is part of daily business for many companies, and sometimes those approaches bear fruit, other times they don’t – and that is all just part of business.

However when you approach an organisation, and attempt to open a discussion, with someone that is supposedly qualified to occupy a reasonably senior position of responsibility within the organisation, and then they refuse to return your calls, instead palming you off to a junior – that has to resort to out-and-out lies and blatant falsehoods as their excuse not to extend the most basic of courtesies – is simply appalling.

As a person that works in field of online education, I believe this is yet one more example of how we are continuing to producing generations of “dumbed-down” kids that have an inability to think for themselves, and certainly not creatively. It also demonstrates how relying on supposed educational qualifications – rather than common sense, is actually hurting business opportunity and inhibiting commercial growth, not only here in New Zealand, but many other countries too.

Being a Director of Zane Education – the owner of currently the largest fully subtitled educational video library currently available online – it is simply not commercially feasible for us to focus on an education market as small as that in New Zealand. However as a father – and a New Zealand citizen, I would love to be able to provide our Visual Learning resources to schools, students and special needs kids in New Zealand at no cost, so as to benefit them.

Being a person that likes to think outside the square, it had occurred to me that one of the most obvious choices available to me, was to team up with a bank so they could provide those resources to schools around New Zealand – and in doing so they would be seen to actively support education in a meaningful way. After all many banks have identified the youth and education markets as an important way of targeting young savers and future new customers. Currently those New Zealand banks attempting to build their brand in the education market are providing little more than lip-service, offering children free plastic piggy banks and providing minimalist advice about financial literacy – all of which may appear great, but is really doing little more than scratching the surface.
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