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We have exciting news! We're changing our name.
Sort of.
We're changing it from ARCO [pronounced arrr-co] to ĀKAU [also pronounced arrr-co]

We feel that ĀKAU is more aligned with our story. We've come a long way since the beginning of ARCO. Here are a few highlights from the last 6 months or so.

>ĀKAU grew from two to three. Felicity Brenchley came on board as our third director and we couldn't be happier. Felicity is based in AKL and is our registered Architect in residence.
>Ākina Launchpad accepted us as one of the 11 teams on their social enterprise accelerator programme. We've never learnt so much in such a short time, met so many inspiring souls or had such an expertise support crew. Big thanks to Byran & Paul from KPMG, Cat from Contact Energy and Emily & Xavier from Ākina. You're awesome.
>We are so grateful to Ministry of Youth Development who have granted us a $51K grant to implement our inaugural training scheme in 2015. We have aligned with NorthTec to deliver our Level 2 NCEA accredited Foundation Course and we think they're awesome.
>Speaking of awesome, Contact Energy awarded us the Community Engagement Award. We spent the prize money on our Pop-up! initiatives and are so grateful for their support.
>Also, we got a few projects signed and sealed. We're really excited to get cranking on the design front for these. Watch this space.

ĀKAU has more context to what we now stand for and also a great meaning in Te Reo Māori. It means where the water meets the land. Nice. To honour this new name the new ĀKAU is going to take a road trip. We'll be going from Christchurch to Northland with 10x imac computers that have been generously donated by CPIT in Christchurch. We'll be documenting our trip, the places we see, the people we meet and the social enterprises that we sniff out en route. In particular we'll be keen (obviously!) on places where water meets the land. Think Kaikoura, Picton, Wellington, Taupo, Rotorua and Auckland. If you know of a social enterprise we should check out, please let us know.

Join us for ĀKAU's inaugural hikoi, here on this blog or on our facebook page.

We'll be changing our website to www.akau.co.nz and our emails etc as we get more into the ĀKAU buzz but we will keep you in the loop for that.

Thank you for your support for ARCO, we look forward to hanging out with you as ĀKAU. Thank you for bearing with us as we switch over logos, websites and other written guff.