Why Stuff donated to help 1000 kids learn life-saving water skills - and how you can help

Tuesday, 14 October 2025

More than 130,000 Kiwi children have never had a swimming lesson. Stuff and Water Safety NZ have teamed up to raise $700,000 to fund lessons for 10,000 kids, helping close the gap in water safety education across New Zealand.

Stuff is fundraising to teach 10,000 Kiwi kids safe swimming this summer. Stuff owner and publisher Sinead Boucher explains why this campaign matters so much - and why her business is contributing for the first 1000 children to learn life saving skills this season.

The summers of my childhood centred always around Christchurch’s Sockburn Pool.

Like most of the kids in that working class neighbourhood, both our parents worked fulltime (and much more), to keep our family afloat. Entry to the pool was cheap, even for those days so my four younger brothers and sisters and I would double each other on bikes down to the pool from early morning to night, leaving only enough for a 50c scoop of hot chips to share at lunchtime.

We loved the water, the dive board, the grassy hills and the sun-warmed concrete bleachers surrounding the outdoor pools. There was a big pool, a toddler pool and a deep diving pool. The place was always absolutely packed with kids and teenagers, with barely an adult in sight. The wonderful John Cousins ran the show and knew every kid and teenager by name. Eddie did the biggest bombs to the cheers of the crowd. In the evenings, the mums and dads would join us for their own cooling swim, and maybe a picnic dinner.

Stuff CEO and publisher Sinead Boucher's childhood spent in water has had a profound impact on her, and she wants all Kiwi kids to experience that freedom.

We all learned to swim at that pool, filing down a couple of times a week from Our Lady of Victories primary school during summer. I don’t actually remember not knowing how to swim - the pool was part of our lives since the first term we started school. We jumped off the diving boards at 5 or 6, and were certainly able to get to the side - spurred on by all the kids on the sideline shouting shark and doing the Jaws music. It was the centre of our social universe. A place we found joy, and survival skills, and the confidence you get from knowing you are capable at life, even when you are literally out of your depth.

When the pool which opened in 1965 was closed in 2006 - just one of the many community and school pools that have closed in recent decades - the working class neighbourhoods that surrounded it mourned. And they mourn it still. You don’t have to hang around very long with people from the area to hear someone say, if they won Lotto they would open the pool back up.

There are now generations of Kiwi kids who grow up without knowing how to swim or how to survive in the water. As the Life Savings campaign we are launching at Stuff highlights, seven out of every 10 New Zealand children can’t float or tread water for 3 minutes. More than 130,000 will never have subsidised lessons. In the coming days and weeks, you’ll read stories about families who lost a child because they couldn’t survive in the water. And stories from families where those basic skills saved a life.

When Sockburn Pool, which opened in 1965, was closed in 2006 the working class neighbourhoods that surrounded it mourned. And they mourn it still, Sinead Boucher writes.

We approached Water Safety New Zealand (WSNZ) with this fundraising campaign because I, like so many others I speak to, want children to enjoy the same kind of childhood we did. For our generation, it felt like a New Zealand birthright to be safe in the water, and your family circumstances didn’t dictate whether you would be.

Now, private lessons are $25 a pop - a cost so many families can’t afford, and schools can’t afford to subsidise. My parents certainly could not have afforded that for the five of us, and how different our lives would have been as a result.

Eight safe swimming sessions in a pool with WSNZ cost $70 and a day at a river or the beach learning water safety skills costs the same - both will save lives. There are other organisations who help deliver WSNZ’s water skills programme too, but still so much unmet need, particularly in areas such as Northland, where being surrounded by our most beautiful beaches is an ever present danger for many school children.

This campaign is personal to me - and I hope for anyone who had the kind of joyful childhood experiences around water that I did. Being able to survive in the water gives you confidence, the chance to safely overcome risk. I still swim in the sea throughout the year, inching myself into cold winter swims knowing that if I can make myself do hard things there, I can do hard things in other parts of my life too. And the exhilaration when you get out is pretty good too.

If you can give a few dollars to help teach safe swimming to 10,000 deserving Kiwi kids this summer, then please do. It will have a profound effect, not just on lives saved, but on how their lives are lived too.

And if you have a Sockburn pool in your memories, tell us that story too. You can email in to lifesavings@stuff.co.nz.

An earlier version of this story stated that three out of 10 Kiwi kids can’t float or tread water for 3 minutes. The correct figure is seven out of 10 (Updated: 11.34am, Wednesday October 15, 2025).