About Lisa Er – founder of The Awareness Party: 
Lisa Er is the creator and founder of The Awareness Party. She is also known for having founded Lisa’s Hummus and dips which are well known in New Zealand.
In 1994, when the business began, not many people ate hummus so it was an interesting concept to combine healthy food with good tasting ethnic recipes. Lisa did just that and the products took off. Lisa had no capital and no experience of business, having been a teacher for 14 years and having 3 young children. She went on to build a business with 29 staff, and won the ASB Business Woman of the Year for Auckland in 2000, and ‘Her Business’ Woman of the Year for North Island in 2001.
Now the business has been sold and the children are grown up and so Lisa is indulging another passion, politics.
Lisa joined the Green Party in 2007, and stood as a candidate in Mt Roskill ( Labour leader Phil Goff’s stronghold). This was a big learning curve for Lisa which she enjoyed. While she strongly preferred the Green’s environmental and social policies to any other political parties, she still felt that there was something missing, and if she was to act in integrity, then it was not ok for her to speak about certain policies where she did not feel comfortable. Therefore she has created a political movement that reflects her views, and the views of many of her friends and associates, who understand how the relationship between consciousness and matter and the interrelatedness of all life affects everything that we do.
Lisa was born in Croydon, England and moved to New Zealand in 1967 with her family, when her parents came to teach at the Quaker school in Wanganui. She attended Wanganui High School and went on to Teachers’ College. She was briefly married to an Australian Aboriginal writer (winner of the 2000 Kate Challis RAKA Award), and then to a Turkish Muslim for over 20 years. This has given Lisa has an inside perspective on Islam, and on the challenges faced by indigenous people.
She has three amazing adult sons, and one delightful granddaughter.
Walking in nature and involvement with music are Lisa’s favourite pastimes, and she has sung in Auckland Choral since 1974, with only a couple of years off for the birth of her sons.
As a child Lisa was aware of fields of rockets pointed towards Russia, as she travelled home from her Yorkshire boarding school. The cold war was very evident in England and Lisa’s parents were founder members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Dorking, Surrey. This led to Lisa’s father being involved as a marshal on the Aldermaston marchers in the sixties. Lisa was allowed to join the demonstration on the last day in London, and took this very seriously. On arrival in New Zealand she created her own petition against the Vietnam War and went door to door getting signatures.
Previously, at age 12, Lisa created an anti-vivisection club at school and she would call meetings and educate other pupils as to what was going on, and what animal tested make up to avoid.
Lisa initiated a local group promoting a Nuclear Free New Zealand, and was involved in the Springbok Tour demonstrations. Since then she has written letters, made submissions, and attended protests on a fairly regular basis.
Lisa co-founded a group, with Greg Menendez, called Take 5. This was an effort to bring people to the point of wanting a moratorium on Genetic Engineering in New Zealand. Although strongly opposed to GE themselves, the idea was to promote a ‘wait 5 years’ approach, and was New Zealand’s first text campaign.
Aerial dropping of insecticides and pest control is another area where Lisa has been speaking out, along with promoting healthy foods, and holistic health. She sees the need to protect complementary medicine and for New Zealand to have its own regulatory system, and not be subjected to multinational business interests.
From the point of view of being in a protest movement Lisa likes Mother Theresas’s quote, that she would rather be ‘pro peace than anti war’, and that is the space that Lisa likes to operate from.
Initially The Awareness Party may be in the position of being an issues or protest movement, however we must remember that being ‘anti’ anything is counter-productive, while visioning a better future will eventually achieve the future that we want.
To follow Lisa on Blogspot go to http://awarenessnz.blogspot.com/
