Dame Lesley Max

Dame Lesley Max

20 September 1945 -

Dame Lesley Max (neé Shieff), is an Auckland-born Jewish secondary school teacher and journalist turned social activist and community leader.

Max first came to wider public attention in the 1980s when a newly established Metro magazine hired her as a contributor with a special remit to focus on the subject of children’s welfare. It was an area she had become deeply interested in while teaching in London, before returning to New Zealand with her husband, Robert, to raise four children.

Max, who was born in 1945, quickly established a reputation as a solid magazine writer, but it was her investigative work in penning Children's Story, a myth-puncturing piece that appeared at a time when New Zealand’s reputation as "a great place to bring up kids” was widely regarded as axiomatic.

With its litany of stories of grave abuse meted out to youngsters, the piece shook that cultural assumption—and the book it inspired, Children: Endangered Species, (Penguin 1990), also helped put paid to it.

The book also led to her co-founding, and leading, what is now Great Potentials Foundation, a social enterprise agency that worked to help address many of the same problems, most notably by using an Israeli social model known as Hippy, or the Home Interaction Programme for Parents and Youngsters. The programme, which has now benefited more than 1,500 New Zealand kids and their families in poorer communities across the country, works by unlocking the latent potential of parental teaching in the home setting as a way of boosting these children's learning achievements.

The foundation she established, and of which she is Chair, is now known as Great Potentials and 30 years on is still helping underprivileged and young people to succeed.

In addition, Max is patron of the Family Help Trust; a member of the Brainwave Trust; the Family Services National Advisory Council; a member of advisory committees at Auckland University of Technology, Auckland College of Education and the University of Auckland. She has also served as secretary of the New Zealand Jewish Council and an executive member of the New Zealand Zionist Federation.

Max was appointed an OBE in the 1994 New Year Honours, and became a Dame in the 2010 New Year Honours, both honours awarded for her services to children. Her damehood followed that of her cousin, Dame Barbara Goodman, which had been awarded in 1989, and they are thought to be the first two Jewish cousins to have received damehoods.

This article was originally published on the Jewish Online Museum. (Edited).

In this video, Dame Lesley talks about the setting up of her Great Potentials foundation as well as Jewish influences on her life and work,

Photo of Lesley Max at her investiture, by New Zealand Government, Office of the Governor-General - https://gg.govt.nz/images/lesley-max, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67520032

This article is a revised version of that which first appeared on the Jewish Online Museum website.

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