People Inspired By Purpose - Purposely Podcast

In this SHORT episode of Purposely, we’re back with NedWills, on an unexpected place his community engagement journey began, and what it taught him about ethics, incentives, and connecting elite sport to grassroots impact.
 
Ned’s eyes were first opened to community work through anunlikely route: working in the oil industry in the early 2000s. Large infrastructure projects in unstable parts of the world meant companies had to invest heavily before seeing any return, which made getting community relationsright a genuine commercial priority, not just good PR. That put Ned at an unusual intersection of sponsorship and community engagement early in his career.
 
What struck him most was the people. Despite working for anindustry that’s easy to criticise from the outside, he found many of his colleagues to be genuinely community-minded, regularly navigating real ethical dilemmas with care. There was a constant tension between commercial pressure todeliver shareholder returns and a genuine desire to make sure the impact on local communities was a positive one.
 
That early exposure to ethical complexity has stayed withNed throughout his career, and it shows up clearly in his work today at Laureus Sport for Good. The Laureus World Sports Awards bring the glitz, but the real work happens at the other end of the scale entirely: taking the inspiration andpassion the world feels watching athletes like Lewis Hamilton, Novak Djokovic and Usain Bolt, and channelling it into young people navigating war, violence, gang crime, and lack of access to education and healthcare. The question Nedkeeps coming back to is how sport’s emotional power can be harnessed to help young people change their own lives, and their communities, for the better.
 This episode of Purposely is brought to you by Benevity and Trust Investments.
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Welcoming Liz Gibbs, CEO Burnett Foundation Aotearoa, to Purposely Podcast. Burnett Foundation is the organisation on a mission to get New Zealand to zero HIV transmission by 2030, while ensuring LGBTQ+ communities have the best possible health and wellbeing.
The conversation starts with the foundation's origin story. Formerly the New Zealand AIDS Foundation, it was set up 40 years ago by three men, including Bruce Burnett, a New Zealander who returned home from San Francisco with HIV and chose to travel the length of the country talking openly about the epidemic at a time when almost nobody else would. His advocacy, and the work that followed, has saved lives and helped shape New Zealand's response to HIV ever since.
Liz talks about where New Zealand sits globally, doing comparatively well with around 95 locally acquired cases in 2024, but still around 15 years behind best practice when it comes to access to modern medication. She covers the science behind U equals U, undetectable equals untransmittable, and the gap between what the evidence says and what the law still allows, including current criminalisation settings around disclosure.
Liz reflects on growing up in a household shaped by her father's experiences in India, an upbringing built around curiosity, openness and an instinct to help, and how that led her into a career spanning Save the Children, Philanthropy New Zealand, Selwyn Foundation and now Burnett Foundation.
Towards the end, the conversation moves into impact investing and innovation. Liz talks about the Burnett Foundation's current Innovation Challenge, which is inviting community organisations, technologists and social entrepreneurs to bring new thinking to old problems, and shares lessons from a similar initiative at Selwyn Foundation that led to a successful equity investment in a New Zealand tech company.
This episode of Purposely is brought to you by Benevity and Trust Investments NZ.

In this SHORT episode of Purposely, we’re back with Rose Challies – founder and director of Terra Nova Foundation – on the uncomfortable truths about how philanthropy actually works, and what it would look like if funders finally put people at the centre.

Rose has a view that cuts through a lot of the noise in this space: we’re not funding projects. We’ve never been funding projects. We’re funding humans to do change making. The sooner philanthropy gets honest about that, the sooner we’ll start backing the right things in the right ways.

She’s direct about the damage done by short-term funding. A 12-month grant is effectively a six-month grant, because six months in, people are already scanning the job pages. The people holding up some of the most important work in our communities have no security, and the sector treats that as normal. Rose doesn’t.

On the power dynamics in philanthropy, she’s clear-eyed. If you control resources that someone else needs, that is a power relationship, whether you intend it to be or not. The best funders understand this and work actively to shift it. The rest… don’t always notice.

Rose also challenges the widespread assumption that philanthropic expertise is somehow optional. She compares it to medicine: we all have some understanding of health, but we don’t all call ourselves doctors. Understanding what poverty or environmental harm looks like from the outside is different from understanding how to change it. That distinction matters, and the sector doesn’t always honour it.

And on the ‘no core funding’ trend she’s seeing from more and more funders: please pay the people doing the work. Even a contribution to someone’s salary, alongside others, makes a difference. Refusing to fund people while demanding their expertise and impact is, in Rose’s words, the biggest travesty in the sector right now.

Key Themes
• Why philanthropy funds people, not projects – and why we should say so
• The real cost of 12-month grants and the insecurity baked into charity work
• Power dynamics in funder-grantee relationships – and how to navigate them
• Philanthropic expertise as a genuine discipline – not a nice-to-have
• The ‘no core funding’ trend and why it undermines the sector
• Backing change makers directly: what it looks like and why it works
• The difference between administrative grant making and change making philanthropy
• New Zealand as a place to try things – and why that opportunity is worth protecting
This episode of Purposely is brought to you by Benevity and Trust Investments.

Welcoming Helen Hughes to Purposely Podcast, Chief Executive and Tai Oroni of Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari, one of New Zealand's most remarkable conservation stories and the world's largest pest-proof fenced sanctuary, sitting in the Waikato near Cambridge.
3363 hectares of restored native forest. 47 kilometres of predator-proof fencing. Kiwi, kokako, giant weta and hundreds of native species finding their footing again in a forest that had lost its voice. The ecological work at Maungatautari is extraordinary. But this conversation is just as much about the human story behind it, and the very real challenge of keeping something this significant financially alive.
Helen came to this role after a life that took her from London investment banking to IT support, insurance, a sausage roll factory, and eventually the government's billion trees programme. It was not a straight line, and she is the first to say that the foundation for where she is now was not laid in her childhood but in a period of profound personal loss that sent her into the forest to heal.
In this conversation Helen and Mark get into the origin story of the sanctuary, how a community in the Waikato took an audacious idea and built something the world has not seen before, and the relationship with iwi that sits at the heart of everything the sanctuary does. The process of tono, iwi to iwi conversation before any translocation takes place, is one of the more quietly moving things discussed in the episode.
Helen also talks openly about what she walked into as CEO. A funding model that had not kept pace with rising costs, a significant operating loss, cash flow at times sitting at just two weeks, and a team that needed steadying. She made the call to go public with the financial reality and talks about why that was the right decision even when it was a hard one.
From there the conversation moves to what she has done to turn things around: growing the tourism business, building out the native nursery, creating on-site accommodation, developing an education programme that now reaches thousands of students a year, and exploring the early promise of biodiversity credits as a potential new way of funding conservation at scale. She is clear that the work is not done and that the pressure is constant.
What comes through is someone who cares deeply about the place, is clear eyed about the challenges still ahead, and is not short of determination to see it through.
This episode of Purposely is brought to you by Benevity and Trust Investments NZ.

In this SHORT episode of Purposely, we’re back with Duncan Matthews – founder of Good Numbers – on funder reporting, the pain of being a volunteer treasurer, and why small charities deserve better tools.
Duncan opens with a familiar frustration: tier four charities – those under $140,000 in annual expenditure – are everywhere in Aotearoa (around 15,000 on the charities register alone), yet virtually no software has been built with them in mind. Small in money, perhaps. But not small in impact.
He talks about the reality of funder reporting – and how wildly it varies. Foundation North makes it simple.Gaming trusts? Not so much. Some require receipts, bank statements, and proof of every expenditure. That’s hours of work, printing and highlighting and photo-taking, just to stay compliant and keep the grants flowing. Good Numbersis built to make that whole workflow dramatically easier.
And then there’s the treasurer problem. Duncan has sat on four nonprofit boards at once – because the role isa “guaranteed vacancy.” Nobody wants it. It’s not because people don’t care; it’s because the tools make it needlessly hard. The xRB reporting standards that arrived in 2013 were a step forward, but most small organisations still struggle to match their old categories to the new ones. Duncan’s insight: if complex tasks can be made easy in other parts of life, why not here?
Good Numbers is his answer – a purpose-built tool that turns bookkeeping and funder reporting from a chore into something close to effortless. Because more time on compliance means less time on mission. And that’s a problem worth solving.
•   Why tier four charities are underserved – and what’s atstake when reporting feels impossible
•     The xRB reporting standards that changed everything,and why many small organisations still struggle
•      The real cost of funder reporting – from gaming trustrequirements to highlighting bank statements
•    Why the volunteer treasurer role is a “guaranteedvacancy” – and how to change that
•   Good Numbers: bookkeeping built for small charities,not adapted for them
•   Making compliance easier so organisations can focus onwhat actually matters
This episode ofPurposely is brought to you by Benevity.
Find Duncan and Good Numbers at goodnumbers.nz – including a free 15-minute demo booking.
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