When Christchurch needed help with its post-quake clean-up, Sam Johnson (pictured above right with his husband Tyler Brummer) formed the Student Volunteer Army. Fifteen years on, he’s still a force for good.
If you ever find yourself on a plane sitting next to Sam Johnson, make sure you know where the emergency exit is. It is not that he won’t be engaging, endlessly enthusiastic company, but he will talk your ear off. You will also more than likely find yourself volunteering for something or other. Or handing over a not inconsiderable amount of money for something or other. “Hustle, hustle, hustle,” he says happily. Hustling is his greatest talent.
He’s the Student Volunteer Army guy. In 2010, via Facebook, after the first Christchurch earthquake, Johnson rallied students to help with the clean-up. Volunteers were encouraged to be cheerful and helpful and can-do. He is perennially cheerful and helpful and can-do, so you might say the volunteer army was a manifestation of his personality. After the 2011 quake there were, at its peak, an estimated 13,000 students involved in helping. There is a picture of a much younger, baby-faced Johnson, with a wheelbarrow, with his by-then-familiar mop of wild curls. He is still, at 36, from my ancient vantage point, baby-faced. Endless enthusiasm can do that to a face.
He left his job as chief executive of the SVA in 2023 to become projects director at Still, a New Zealand-based company founded by Hideaki Fukutake, the only child of billionaire Japanese businessman Soichiro Fukutake.
Still is an investment company that does many other innovative things, often involving art projects – the most famous being the Naoshima art island in Japan. Here, the family company, the Benesse Corporation, which has made the family’s fortunes through education and publishing businesses, has transformed a run-down, polluted island into a wonderland of art and architecture and landscaping.
They are an interesting family. They believe, like Johnson, in the concept of service to community. They and he make what is called a good fit.
The afternoon I speak to him he had spent the morning flying in a helicopter to Awaawaroa Valley on Waiheke Island. The helicopter’s cargo was a one-tonne stone bench, made by sculptor Anton Forde. This is the first bench to be installed in Still’s Paererewā – the 1000-Year Bench Project. “The benches have got to be a seat worth sitting on, a location worth going to, with a reflection or message that’s worth carrying forward for 1000 years.”
The idea is that the benches will encourage people to go to beautiful places, contemplate and reflect. Could he sit on a bench and contemplate? It is a bit hard to imagine. Hustle, hustle, hustle, remember. He claims he could. “Whenever I do contemplate, I come up with something.” That made me laugh. That is not contemplating; that’s working.
Good things
He might be a corporate geezer now? “I’d say that it’s more quasi. I guess I’m a little bit of a corporate geezer in the sense that I look after a number of Hideaki’s companies in New Zealand. I look after a lot of the small ones and all the cultural and arts projects, the community side of things. I try and not let the companies lose money. But we don’t. We do good things.”
Doing good things has always been his raison d’être. He says he was a terrible goody-goody at school.
He comes from a farming family in Mayfield, Mid Canterbury. They had a cropping and beef and sheep farm of 800ha. He says, like many farmers, they were “asset rich and cash poor. That was my experience growing up. Yeah, we were definitely from a wealthier family than many in New Zealand but my parents worked really hard all of their lives, as my grandparents did. You work right to the death, really, when you’re farming.”
He went to Christ’s College in Christchurch as a boarder for his first two years then as a day boy. It has been described as the most elite school in the country, and the most expensive. He might be posh. “Do I sound posh?” Nah. He sounds like a Canterbury farming boy who comes from good stock. “I’d say I’m more of a chameleon. I can move into a lot of different spaces quite easily.”
He used to do his good things in shorts and slightly tatty T-shirts, with wheelbarrows as props. He sent me a more recent picture of him wearing a dark blue satin suit. He can be a bit flamboyant, I say. He’d say eccentric. I ask, in what ways? “I like fun ideas and I’ve got quite a big personality. I like dressing with colour. I’m not afraid of standing out. I’m also quite happy to blend in.”
Hmm. Is he really? He would be hard to miss. He wears enormous black-framed specs. He once said, “A lot of people meet me and don’t realise I’m gay.” Hmm, again. Those glasses might be a bit Elton John. “I like Elton John,” he says. He revises his quote. “I think you’ll take one look at me with the bloody big glasses and say, ‘Oh, there’s a gay!’” He likes his enormous glasses, obviously. Also, “You just get older; you need glasses. And if you’re going to have glasses, have really cool ones.”
I like fun ideas and I’ve got quite a big personality. I like dressing with colour. I’m not afraid of standing out.
A burning question: what happened to his lovely curls? “Oh, terrible, isn’t it?” One day, he had them chopped off and they’ve never grown back. “Very, very sad. And my mother has never forgiven me.”
He told his parents he was gay when he was 17. He was nervous, of course. “I think they knew it was coming. But, you know, it’s always a shock when a person tells you anything.” There was one other gay guy at Christ’s College when he was there – that he knew of. “Oh yeah, all of the other ones have now come out of the closet.”
Christ’s College is an Anglican school but he was raised a Catholic. He is still a Christian but not a Catholic. “They don’t really like gays and they don’t really like surrogacy, so … There’s no need to be anti-anything. Like: why are you anti-trans? Why are you anti-gay or anti-surrogacy? These blanket rules are just wrong.”
Endless optimism
He didn’t want me to bang on about him being a Christian, but, “Yeah, I do believe in God. I believe in something. I don’t know why. But I do.”
I think what he really believes in is optimism. He is endlessly optimistic. I suppose you’d have to be if you have spent your life – and what has, oddly, become his career – trying, and often succeeding, in persuading people to be nice, good and generous people.
He “sort of wondered” if he was going to be a politician. “I came pretty close. I nearly did.”
In the 2010 local body elections, he successfully stood for the Riccarton-Wigram Community Board of Christchurch City Council. When Lianne Dalziel stood for the mayoralty in 2013, she wanted him to be her running mate, an offer he decided against accepting. From a 2012 piece in The Press: “When the first openly gay prime minister of New Zealand is elected, there are decent odds that his name will be Sam.”
Rules are sometimes made to be broken and you need to change things.
“Ha. I don’t think so.” He decided politics was not where he wanted to make his career. But if he was to be our first gay prime minister, which party would he be leader of? “Any that would have me! I’ve always been sort of aligned with the National Party. But probably more under a Nikki Kaye [a former deputy leader who died in 2024] school of National Party. I was always quite close with her and that kind of left side of a fiscally conservative government.”
His Christ’s College alumni listing has his occupation as “activist”. “I think I will always be slightly activist.” Which means what? “Well, Wikipedia put it there for a start. So I didn’t choose it. And I remember once, years and years and years ago, [former prime minister] John Key introduced me at an event and called me out as an activist.
“Other people on the activist list on Wikipedia at the time were Hone Harawira and Mrs Harawira, these sort of people. So I think I would define it as not really happy with the status quo and that we can do better. And that rules are sometimes made to be broken and you need to change things.”
A thing he would like to change: the reimbursement of volunteers in times of disaster. The example he gives is the bulldozer driver in Gisborne after Cyclone Gabrielle. “He would probably volunteer for a month and help so many people if somebody would just pay for his fuel.”
Quiet activism
The benches are a quiet sort of activism. A contemplative one. The idea behind the concept – and it is a lovely one – is that they will contribute to contented communities and provide links throughout the country to little-known natural sites.
A thousand benches is a hell of a lot of benches. It is also a hell of a lot of hustle. There you are on that plane sitting next to him and by the time you arrive at your destination you have somehow agreed to donate, say, the money for the concrete fitting a bench will sit on, or a bloody big rock to be turned into a bench. A bench does not have to be an actual bench. If you can perch on it, it is a bench.
“There are a lot of people out there with funds who are interested in doing good, interesting things with them. And the trick is asking.” He is adept at the asking. “I think Student Army was a good experience. I wish I was better 10 years ago because I wasn’t, actually. But I think it’s listening to people and then being able to adapt to what they’re interested in. Hustle, hustle, hustle; 1000 benches to do.”
Here’s another of his hustles. He and his American husband, Tyler Brummer, married in 2020. Brummer was here doing his PhD in ecology and his plan was always to return to the United States. Johnson has said he had to convince him to stay in New Zealand. And you try getting out of Johnson’s clutches once he has you in his sights. “He wanted the New Zealand passport. So that was easy.”
It’s a good story and entirely untrue. He had to convince Brummer that he’d found “a good catch”. They met online and then in person at the Monday Room, a pretty swanky sort of place in Christchurch. “I was definitely all dressed up. You could call it posh. And he was definitely an ecologist from Lincoln [University] going, ‘Who’s this guy in a power jacket and fancy shoes who was all in just hustle mode?’ If you call me flamboyant, he’s not. He’s understated.”
In 2024, their daughter Elsie was born after a lengthy and expensive and often frustrating struggle through surrogacy. Elsie is named after Johnson’s great- and great-great-grandmothers. His great-great-grandmother was a volunteer with Kate Sheppard, the suffragette.
How persuasive is he? I asked if I could have a bench for my sheep paddock in the Wairarapa. Nope. It has to be accessible to the public. But he somehow talked me into calling for the good citizens of the Wairarapa to suggest locations of historical importance or places that are lovely to look at. You are to send your suggestion to paererewa.org.nz. Got that? Good.
He issued, by email, one last instruction: “And thank you for not making me out as a crazy in your article … not posh, not too gay, not too religious … just a normal guy who likes volunteering and benches!!!” He didn’t say I couldn’t say that he might be just a bit bossy. So I will. And I mean it in the nicest possible way.