 Kia ora koutou, no ote potia ho, ko ana toku noa nami hinui kia koutou. Since I'm the only person that hasn't spoken yet up on stage, it got decided that I would facilitate this conversation. But I'm really excited because these are two of the most inspiring women in New Zealand. Not most, there's so many inspiring women, but these two women are really walking the talk around how we can make a difference where we are with what we have. So I think the plan is I'm going to do an introduction first around crowdfunding and then we're going to move over to Lani who's going to talk about philanthropy and then Lisa's going to share her personal experiences raising funding within Aotearoa. So my name is Anna Gunther. I'm the co-founder and chief bubbleblower of a crowdfunding platform here in Aotearoa in Australia called Pledge Me. Who here knows Pledge Me? So Pledge Me started around seven years ago. It was actually my master's thesis. I was really frustrated with my job that I had in the government. Sorry for my government friends that are here. But I realized that I wasn't having the impact that I wanted to have. And then in order to do that, I'd probably have to either go out and go into academia or work for a private company. And I accidentally did both. So I did my master's and started Pledge Me as my thesis. So what we do is we run a crowdfunding platform here in New Zealand. And we started before Kickstarter made it to our shores. But we also run an equity crowdfunding platform. We were the first licensed platform here in Aotearoa and actually the world. So New Zealand was the first country in the world to change its legislation to allow equity crowdfunding. It was already happening in the UK. They managed to get around their securities laws. Great job. But we were the first licensed platform here and we've recently been licensed over in Australia. So do you know what equity crowdfunding is? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Camilla knows she is currently running an equity crowdfunding campaign. Equity crowdfunding is the idea that instead of going out to your crowd and offering them rewards, you actually offer them shares in your company. Previously, in order to do that, you'd have to go through a public listing or a prospectus process, which is very expensive. So it's very exclusionary. It's only the people that have money that can make more money by going out to their crowds. So the idea with equity crowdfunding was it was supposed to democratize capital. And specifically in Aotearoa and Australia, they came out thinking that would be something for startups. What we've learned is it's not something for startups. It's actually what we've seen at least is it's for companies that already have a crowd that love what they do. And it's a chance for them to go out to their crowd and raise the money they need to go to the next level. So instead of using this tool to replace community, it's actually enhancing community. It's giving people that care about your outcomes the opportunity to buy into them and then go out there and sell what you do because they own a piece of you. What we believe is it's moving beyond this sort of pure focus on profit maximization. Because that's the only reason you're investing in someone. That's the only thing you're going to care about. But if you already love what the company is doing, you probably love what's going to happen with your money and where they're going to go. And you're going to support them along the way in quite a different way. So that's crowdfunding and equity crowdfunding and who I am. I'd like to pass over to Lani to talk about philanthropy. Kia ora again. So I just wanted to give a little bit of an overview of what philanthropy looks like in Aotearoa and some of the challenges that we have in this space as well. So philanthropy in New Zealand, we give away about $2.8 billion a year, which to me sounds like a lot. But to contextualize that, the Gates Foundation gives away $4.8 billion a year. So it's actually not that much when you think about a global context. Only three percent of those funds are donated by business. Forty two percent are donated by trusts and foundations. And the rest of it is personal philanthropy. So people like you and me jumping on platforms or giving to someone on the street or however we choose to do that. So philanthropy looks very different in New Zealand than it does in lots of other places in the world. But we are, by contrast, every year, the most generous nation in the world or in the top three, usually tied with Australia, which is great for me. I was born in Australia, so I feel like I get both sides of this. Yeah, but it's a challenging space. So in terms of how that money gets parceled out, about $300 million of that comes from the gaming and licensing trusts. So when you put money in the poker machines, they have to give back a portion of that. And that's about $300 million of our philanthropy every year. About $265 million of that is from family trusts and from energy trusts. And then another $230 million is from the Lottery Community Grants. So we have it parceled out into different parts of philanthropy and they all behave in quite different ways from each other. In terms of where the money goes, about 24% of where our philanthropy goes in New Zealand goes to social services. And a lot of that is kind of picking up some of the gaps left by government. 23% goes to health and medical research and only 3% goes to our environment. So we have some work to do in terms of thinking what our collective cultural and national priorities might be. I think the role of philanthropy is to be the risk-takers and the innovators. I think our job is to be really at one radical end of what it means to create change in New Zealand. I think we should be mobilising movements. I think we should be convening conversations and definitely being at that radical end as often as we possibly can. We can do things that other people can't do. We're not business. We're not constrained by the things that business is constrained by. We're not government. We're not constrained by the things that government is constrained by. But we're not taking full advantage of that opportunity. And there's a few reasons for that. One is that demand exceeds supply. So in New Zealand, we have about 27,000 registered charities, which is one for every 180 people. And I don't know exactly how many people are in this room, but there's probably two charities that could represent us as a group. We also do tend to pick up government shortfalls, particularly with things like educational facilities. So helping to build new buildings, helping to repair buildings, helping to pick up the shortfalls in our education system is something that we do a lot of. And it's probably not where we're best utilised. We're not effectively partnering with Iwi. And we're also a little bit conservative. So we tend to have people sitting on the boards of philanthropic trusts who are quite conservative and who are risk-averse. And all of these things together mean that as a sector, and as part of a wider ecosystem, we're not really pushing the boundaries of change and being the risk takers and innovators that we could be. And I think the other piece that's good to know for New Zealand context is that we haven't really decided where we sit on social enterprise yet. Should we be funding it? Should we not be funding it? We haven't made a decision about that yet. We haven't really had that conversation as openly as we could, which is why we need to have people like Anna, for many reasons, doing the work that she's doing, to supplement some of the shortcomings of philanthropy in New Zealand. Hi, as I mentioned before, to eat my lunch is a limited liability company. And we started it in my house, as all good startups do. And after kind of three months, we really were outgrowing my home kitchen and we needed some money. Now being a company, but even though we're doing social good, we couldn't get any grants. We couldn't get funding. There were people trying to offer us money, but because we weren't a registered charity, we couldn't accept that money. So the first protocol was we went and did a crowdfunding campaign on Pledge Me for a project. And we raised $130,000 to move out of my home into a commercial kitchen. Six months later, we wanted to open a kitchen in Wellington, again, trying to figure out where we were going to get this capital from. And at the time, Pledge Me just launched their debt lending platform. And we were the first New Zealand company to run a debt lending, debt crowd lending campaign. And we raised around $830,000 through that. So that's different from equity. We actually borrowed money from the New Zealand public. And for every $1,000 that someone lent us, we gave them 6% interest in return. And another 6%, they could choose whether they wanted that as a lunch donated to kids. So it was a part, almost like a social bond in a way. And we also gave people the choice whether they wanted to forego their interest altogether and give two lunches every month to kids. It was an interesting social experiment. And we had about 24% of our lenders actually forego their own interest to give more lunches. In 2017, the business grew again very quickly and we needed more capital, particularly around infrastructure and IT. What is interesting to note is that impact investment funds didn't exist in New Zealand that we were aware of about three years ago. And even two years ago when we were looking for more capital, that wasn't really an option for us. And so we went to private investors. And we eventually had Foodstuffs North Island, who owns half the supermarkets in New Zealand, invest in us. And so they came on and took about 26% of the business. Right now, we are in the middle of another capital raise. And now it's to fund further growth and also for us to look at potentially franchising the model overseas. What's been interesting going through this round is that there are now impact investment funds available. That there's still really early days. And some of the ones that we've spoken to, what's been interesting is that they have an incredibly high internal rate of return that they're expecting from a social business. So that makes it very difficult for a business like ours to meet those financial targets. So I think there's still a bit of work to do there. Some foundations that traditionally have only funded charities or not-for-profits have also started opening up to actually invest in social businesses, either through debt or equity. So that's been another interesting kind of option. But again, it's still really new and they're not quite sure what they want. What we're also now exploring is actually doing an equity crowdfunding campaign. Because as Anna said, we've got three and a half years behind us, we've got a strong crowd, a really great brand out there, and we think we could raise the money pretty quickly at a higher valuation than private investors and without the restrictions of private investment around governance, that the direction they wanna take the business and control. So yeah, that's where we're at at the moment. Kia ora. Thanks. So we have around nine minutes left and I think that what would be really interesting is to maybe hear maybe your biggest learning or your favorite story from the work that you're doing, favorite example of things that you've seen in your space that you'd like to share might be interesting. And I'll start with one of my favorite stories or from one of my favorite campaigns. I can't say eat my lunch because this list is on stage. But one of our recent campaigns was, last year was in Dunedin. In Dunedin is where my family is from, some of my family. And what it was was, I don't know if many of you know but you probably do being New Zealanders, that Cadbury's decided to stop making chocolate in Dunedin. And Dunedin has a history of over 100 years of making chocolate. And when Cadbury said that they would make more of a profit if they took their production back to Australia, some Dunedin city councilors got really pissed off. And they were like, we're not okay with this. We're gonna go out to our community and we're gonna raise the money to buy by the Cadbury's factory. And then they realized that the Cadbury's factory was worth $20 million. And so they decided to actually go out and buy a chocolate company. And so they went to the crowd and had $5 million pre-pledge to their campaign before they even had a company they could buy. And then when they went out to their crowd, they managed to raise $2 million in 32 hours to buy the chocolate company and fund its expansion. And the beautiful thing with what they did was, they said, we don't want people to have to invest, you know, $10,000 or $5,000. The minimum investment is $100. Anyone in the community who would like to, we'd like to give them the opportunity to own this. And everyone who invests is gonna get a 20% discount for life. So if you eat $500 worth of chocolate, you've effectively eaten your investment. And the first newsletter they sent out to their database for their investors, which was over 3,000 people, they sold out of chocolate. And so I think that shows the power of actually owning companies in our community again. I have eaten my investment in chocolate. I have eaten my investment in chocolate. A couple of times over now. I think one of the really great examples from the work that I do with the Vodafone Foundation is a Christchurch-based organization called Cultivate. And we started working with them about five years ago through purely grant funding. And at one point we said, okay, well there's lots of people that we're funding individually for their individual projects. What would happen if we gave you some money and said, collaborate? And what came out of that was Cultivate. Cultivate is an organization that works with young people, primarily with young people who have had more difficult lives and uses work on the land in their urban farm to help those young people think about lots of different parts of their life, learn some skills, communicate with each other and build community. They've been working in a social enterprise model for quite some time now and they've been selling the produce that the young people create to lots of local restaurants in Christchurch and they're just about to take over the farmer's market in Christchurch as well. And it's come from a philanthropic model but it's been a philanthropic model and a philanthropic grant-making model that's supporting these people to create a sustainable long-term intervention for young people in their community. And it's one that I'm incredibly proud of. If you're in Christchurch, please go and visit them. I think as everyone here would know, raising capital is hard work. Whether it's crowdfunding or privately is a lot of work. And what I've found is that because of our strong social mission, actually the public are such a great source of that funding. And for us to kind of actually now decide to do this equity crowdfunding campaign, we were sitting there as a board going, why would we even go private? And it just made total sense for us to do it through the public and it gives you such great public awareness. Generates a lot of goodwill. And for us as well, we always wanted to bring everyone along and be a part of solving this issue that we have in New Zealand. And so I think crowdfunding is a really great way of doing that and very innovative way, now having three different options to crowdfund, not just through equity, which can be really scary when you first start up, you don't want to give away a massive chunk of your company. But now isn't the right time for us to do that and have people, the New Zealand public, own parts of Eat My Lunch. I just want to jump in for a second. So with my other hat on, the social enterprise that I helped to run, Thank You Payroll, we did an equity crowdfunding raise about almost two years ago now. And up until less than 12 months ago, we didn't have any marketing budget. All of our client acquisition came entirely from word of mouth. It came from organic growth because people love what we do. And the people who became our shareholders have really amplified that. So yeah, it's got many, many positives. So one thing that I'd like to ask both of you is if you could change something around the funding state in New Zealand, specifically for social enterprises or philanthropy, like what's the thing that you would change? Like what's the, what will help make Aotearoa more inclusive and better for social enterprise? I think because we have this real view here around charities versus business. And we, as a business, while there's many advantages, we are also disadvantaged versus a charity. So we can't get any funding. We've had some really wonderful partners that've been quite creative. So for example, the Goodman Field of Trust, when we moved into commercial kitchen, wanted to help us, but they, in their constitution, they couldn't because we went to charity. So they bought a $25,000 oven and they've rented it to us for life, basically. And so there are some creative ways of getting around it, but there's definitely a lot of opportunities we've missed out on, despite the fact that we do do this social good. So I think that charity versus business status needs to change and social enterprise needs to be recognized legally in some way. Yeah, I agree. I think at the moment, organizations like mine, the Vodafone Foundation, we can't really support social enterprises that are set up as a business. And that's for good reason. The money that we have to give out to community belongs to community. It belongs to all of us. It belongs to New Zealand. And so to put that into a venture that was potentially earning money for private individuals, it's an ethically complicated place to go. Whereas if we had some sort of legal structure that helped to identify social enterprises, that would be an easier conversation for us to have. I've always been on the opposite side of this debate just because I'm so tired and the idea of having to jump through hoops to prove that you're a social enterprise, because that happens all the time. I've always been like, fuck it, I'm just gonna do what I'm doing and I'll make it work. But I'm slowly coming across to your side. Yeah. So yeah, just to wrap up, I think, is there any final thoughts on funding or anything that you'd like to say, while we have a crowd of people that seem to be listening intently? Are you okay with what we're doing right now? Yeah, okay. Any other final thoughts? New Zealand is a small place. Everyone knows everyone. And I remember we hosted some breakfasts when we were doing the debt lending campaign to have people like Malcolm turn up and all these amazing New Zealanders come to kind of find out about what we were doing was really incredible. And I think when you reach out, I'm generally overwhelmed by the response. Yeah, New Zealanders are incredibly generous, but the funding landscape here is also very competitive. And if anyone in the room, and I know there's a few of you, our philanthropists, let's push things towards the more radical end. Let's fund activism. Let's fund systems change and social change. I really can't say anything better than what Lani just said, but I totally agree. I think that in order to create an Altearoa that includes everyone to create a space where we can work together, we need to think radically differently about how we fund and what we expect out of the other end. I don't think we can keep on expecting extractive profit over planet and over people. So I think that we just like to leave you thinking that you can be a little bit more activist in your work. You're probably already really activist, but let's get radical on this and let's actually change how we think about funding. Kia ora. Thank you.