About this site

Time With YA means Time With Your Ancestors.

The premise is simple, and it’s the premise this whole publication runs on: you can’t fix what you haven’t diagnosed, and you can’t diagnose what you haven’t traced back to its source.

Understanding history isn’t a prerequisite to caring about the present.

It’s a prerequisite to actually changing it.

The method

Many of the world’s biggest, most stubborn problems get treated like scrapes — cover the visible symptom and hope it fades.

This publication starts somewhere else.

What if the wound is infected?

What if it isn’t?

And how would we know the difference?

The only way to find out is to move beneath the symptom and trace the wound back to the mechanism actually producing it.

Two questions run underneath much of what we investigate here.

Access — who gets to enter, use and participate.

Ownership — who gets to hold, control, keep and pass down.

Where Access and Ownership have been systematically constrained across generations, seemingly unrelated problems can sometimes turn out to be different symptoms of the same underlying mechanism.

But that’s something we investigate.

Not something we assume.

What you get

The Time With YA Letter is free, and it’s where every issue starts.

We take a problem — historical or current — slow it down, trace what produced it and examine the solutions already on the table.

And sooner or later, we ask:

What is this actually treating?

A bandage?

A painkiller?

An antibiotic?

Sometimes a bandage is exactly what’s needed.

Sometimes relief is urgent.

But treating the symptom, repairing the damage and stopping the mechanism producing new damage are different jobs.

Around here, we try not to confuse them.

The Time With YA Prescription is paid, this is where solutioning happens.

Who this is for

Written first for changemakers in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia — people already doing the work who deserve a direct answer to a difficult question:

Is the work you’re doing treating the root cause, or just easing the symptoms for another year?

And it’s built, honestly, for anyone who would rather spend more time diagnosing and treating the disease than keep restocking bandages.

Who’s writing this

I grew up across Nigeria, New Zealand and Australia, with a background that runs through corporate life in the technology ecosystem, extended stretches of volunteer work, and years of firsthand time in the American South doing the research this publication draws from.

That combination matters to how I approach the work.

I’m looking at these questions partly from the outside, partly from experience, and always with an interest in tracing what we see today back through the machinery that produced it.

History matters here.

But only because we’re trying to do something about the present.

Where to start

If this is your first time here, start with the very first Letter:

The Scrape That Wouldn’t Heal

It contains the question behind everything that follows:

What if some of our biggest problems persist because we’re treating the wrong wound?

Then come back next week.

It's time to heal the world.

— YA

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