A couple of weeks ago I was in an amazing room full of kaikōkiri or people who are leading a range of community-focused kaupapa. J.R McKenzie Trust had pulled together this group of leaders to wānanga on a topic very close to my heart: how we, as community-focused rōpu, become more self-sufficient.
I can’t go past that point without a quick indulgent reflection on how humbling it was to be in a room full of people doing such hard, important, and effective mahi for our communities. I was there to listen and learn from my big sisters and big brothers, and I learned more than I can express in words just yet.
All of us are trying to make things better for our communities, but how do we do that without the extremely effortful dependency we have on funding and grants?
This is a problem for a few reasons. I've had the privilege of leading our Shoebox Christmas kaupapa for a while now and haven't needed to ask much for funding - this has changed a lot over the last couple of years as we've started building our rangatahi leadership kaupapa, along with the learning scaffolding and the web application that leadership sits on.
As soon as that need for funding started, I learned three things:
Funders are awesome and definitely want to help.
For the most part, the mechanical process of applying for funding is really time-consuming and takes huge amounts of time away from the actual kaupapa. As a volunteer, this means I've spent way too much of the little time I have after whanau, work etc. looking for funding to help create the outcomes, rather than working on the actual outcomes. Most funders want you to specify exactly how the outcomes you're creating, align with what they've said their fund is for, (and they're all different). Articulating that takes (at least) hours.
All that time spent on applications is by definition for an uncertain result (they’re called applications for a reason). There is way too much work we need to do in our communities for any funder to be able to help every initiative they receive an application for.
There are a few funders working to make the above less challenging, challenging themselves within the philanthropy sector (I sounded that word out as I typed nearly as slowly as I say it!). J.R McKenzie Trust is doing an amazing job of this. Shout out to Wellington Community Fund too!
Everyone in the room is doing incredible things from and for their communities, often on the smell of an oily rag. But here we are, trying to figure out how to carry on doing so, without spending so much time and uncertainty on making sure that rag stays just oily enough for the engine to continue running. Someone called it economic emancipation.
That’s a crazy proposition when you consider that if the people in that room were capitalists, they'd be at least millionaires. The collective impact everyone in that picture makes, with extremely limited resources, is huge. I’m pretty sure if that energy, inherited wisdom, and ability to create outcomes from so little financial input were focused on personal success instead of the collective wellbeing of our communities - it would be a fortune 500 photoshoot. But all of us there care more about our communities than our bank balance, so that’s where we spend our time, and so the challenge exists.
One of the things I’m pondering within that challenge is what are the things we do in Shoebox Christmas and our quickly growing rangatahi leadership kaupapa, which we can tweak slightly and shape into something people are currently buying - creating a revenue stream to fund our rangatahi programme.
We got this far without any significant funding needed for our model. You helped make that happen, and while I've said it before, there's no such thing as being too grateful. So thank you! And thank you in advance for the support I know you’ll give as we face this new challenge of a wider impact through the rangatahi leadership programme, and the taller costs to do so.
And here’s the first piece of help I’m asking for.
We tested the idea of businesses supporting the project last year. In exchange for some financial support to get the new website build started, we showcased their support on the front page of the website, or at a project level, when someone logs on to view the details of who they’ve been matched with. We’re doing the same this year.
If you know of any businesses that might be interested in the above, please let us know here.
And as always, if you’d like to upgrade your support and receive our more regular kōrero over and above (what I consider) critical updates and when the project opens, you can do so here.
Ngā mihi nui,
Pera and the Shoebox Christmas whānau
PS if you’re currently a free ‘critical updates only’ subscriber, sorry if you don’t consider this critical but I did (this is one way we build our rangatahi leadership programme, and I reckon that’s important enough to bother you with - but I’m always open to feedback, so let me know in the comments if I’m right or wrong).