He sells chocolate bars to to raise money for World Vision and for his five sponsored children. "I'm going to do it until my dying days," he says.
Mark was born with cerebral palsy and is living with tetraplegia, which means he is paralysed from the neck down. But being in a wheelchair hasn't stopped the 33-year-old from living a very full and busy life.
Mark lives in a self-contained unit in Onehunga, and is an advocate for the inclusion into society of people living with a disability in New Zealand. He speaks at national and international events about how he lives his life independently, including at a Parliamentary breakfast where several MPs rated him the highlight speaker.
"I inspire people to do what they want. I can do this, so they can too," Mark says.
Newmarket Business Association chief executive Cameron Brewer says Mark is famous on Broadway. "Everyone knows him, and respects him. We only ever get positive comments about him," Mr Brewer says.
Mark's father, Chris, has recently written a biography of Mark called The Chocolate Seller on Broadway and His Kids: The Story of Mark Grantham.
Chris started the book, which tells the story of Mark's remarkable life, in 2007. "It's his story for the first 33 years. It starts with a chocolate seller, and ends with a chocolate seller."
"‘From my window up there,’ began the woman in an
accusatory tone, ‘I’ve been watching this poor guy sitting out here Saturday in, Saturday out, often in the cold, just dumped there. It’s shameful, I tell you, shameful.’
‘Mark actually likes being here, doing this,’ I explained to the irate woman. ‘He’s doing what he can to help others.’ Others far less fortunate than himself, it should have been blindingly obvious.
The one and a half square metres of footpath space on Broadway, Newmarket, Auckland from which Mark Grantham sells his chocolate bars for charity has to be one of the smallest retail sites in New Zealand. One regular customer jokingly refers to it as Mark’s ‘office’, because it is where Mark – severely disabled with cerebral palsy since birth – has plied his trade for the last seventeen years.For 20 years now, I’ve been Mark Grantham’s chocolate admin man. For 33 years I’ve also doubled as his father, so I’ve got to know him rather well. His is quite a story – and there’s much, much more to it than chocolate – taste, and you’ll see what I mean."
Mark says he will continue to raise money for World Vision because it is "helping lots of kids around the world". Currently, Mark sponsors three World Vision children in Mumbai, India and two in the Magugu community in Tanzania, eastern Africa. Mark visited India in 2005 and Tanzania in 2009 to meet his sponsored children in person.
Buy the book via Cocoa Bean Press.
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