Kindness Week 2021 – Making It Sweeter For Aotearoa

This coming Saturday (13 November) is World Kindness Day and the start of Good Bitches Baking Kindness Week. This year, we’re marking Kindness Week with a campaign to Make it Sweeter and the launch of our second cookbook Mahi Pēkena Māreikura: Baking by the Good Bitches of Aotearoa.

Kindness Week is Good Bitches Baking’s major fundraising drive for the year, raising awareness of the organisation and its kaupapa. Each year during the week we see a hike in people reaching out to join our 3000+ volunteers, and the campaign also introduces us to new potential recipient organisations.

The campaign kicks off with a selection of the GBB chapters holding ‘stalls’ in public spaces on Kindness Day where they will give away baking to passers-by, simply to make their day sweeter, no agenda, no strings attached, just a moment of kindness. The chapters involved are:

• Invercargill – The Pantry Market, 133 Grace Street
• Dunedin – Meridian Mall
• Whanganui – Majestic Square
• Taupo – Te Heu Heu Street

(A note - our chapters will be observing hygiene and Covid19 protocols as our focus is on spreading kindness not Covid!)

GBB General Manager Anjuli Muller says, “Comfort food and manaakitanga have never felt more necessary, or natural, than over the past year or so. Sharing baking in person hasn’t always been possible, and our volunteers have really felt this, because they signed up to give these moments of sweetness to people having a tough time, and now, when the whole country is having a tough time, they haven’t been able to swing into action.”

GBB’s second cookbook, Mahi Pēkena Māreikura is 140 pages of Kiwi favourites from some of our favourite Kiwis and the hearts and homes of Aotearoa. With a beautiful foreword by Robyn Malcolm, it features bakers like Drs Siouxsie Wiles and Ashley Bloomfield, Dames Jools and Linda Topp, BENEE, Jack Tame, Jo Seagar, Gemma McCaw, Karen Walker, Peta Mathias, and of course some of our own Head Bitches.

As well as the recipes, there are personal introductions from many of our contributors and stories from some of our recipient organisations.

Ava Gorzeman, Mahi Pēkena Māreikura Project Lead says, “This project has taken a lot of good people volunteering their time, skills, and energy to create something that is pretty bloody marvellous – all with the goal of spreading a little kindness throughout Aotearoa. It’s a gift from our recipe contributors, who took the time out of their busy schedules to give us all a little glimpse into their lives, through the universal love language of baked goodies.”

The cookbook is available through the GBB online shop at tinyurl.com/mahi-pekena-mareikura, and from selected bookshops around the motu. A list of these will be available on the website as well.

Taking inspiration from similar trends on Twitter, the Good Bitches Baking social media channels will be running hot during the week with Make Someone’s Day Sweeter messages of kindness from members of the public. People can make a donation to GBB and send us, via any of our social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn) a message of kindness for someone they think would like to hear one, which we will share anonymously on their behalf. The idea is two-fold, to generate ever-spreading ripples of kindness while also raising the essential funds GBB needs to continue its mahi.

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