 Ina mana whenua ka rangamai tēnā koutou katoa, koti au mai rengi, toko moanga, ko Whanganui a Tarati awa, ko McDonald's toku iwi, ko Aiken toku hapu, nopinikia hau, ko Louise toku ingoa, koti Akina Foundation toku mahi, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. It is huge honour to be here and to join a number of my Akina whānau, both present and past, including a chairman, it's lovely to have so many people that are familiar to me coming here and I'm totally embracing my imposter syndrome because I sat here this morning and just the depth of passion and enthusiasm and love in this room is kind of intimidating. So, and I'm going to do a call out to actually following Sonya's poem to my mum. My mum died 12 years ago and at her funeral somebody said to me she will always be a fan tale. She comes into our lives and she brings happiness and losing her really showed me that importance of family and the importance of following your generational wellbeing and one thing my mum always showed me that in action and she always showed it by who she surrounded herself and how she cared for others so I stand here with my mum today. So I would like to talk about the power of impact and why it is driving me, why it is driving many of us here in this room and why we have to be bold in that. Akina means to encourage bold action. And just recently we went through a real reframing of who we are as an organisation and what we think our role is in delivering a prosperous inclusive New Zealand and in that was what's our purpose? What are we actually here to do? And people know us as growing social enterprise but actually we thought is that bold enough? Are we actually living our values? And we thought well actually no. It's much, much bigger than that. What we need to do is help transform the economy by harnessing the power of impact. And that sounds really big and the pressure that we put on ourselves to be bold is actually it should be even bigger than what we think. And the opportunity to do that is now. I was lucky along with a few of us in the room, I see Lily and I see Shae somewhere, to head off to Edinburgh for the Social Enterprise World Forum in Scotland in September. And we went as 84 New Zealanders, we went along and we not only learnt and we not only networked and we not only shared but we really bought a confidence and a real drive to actually get shit done. And one thing I kind of struggled with this while I was there, I was like we get so caught up in ourselves, we get so caught up in what is social enterprise and what isn't it? We debate who's got a better social enterprise, whose structure is better. And I was just like oh god that seems so limited. So actually I came back and we thought well what do we do with that? What do we do to actually transform this economy? And I'm kind of thinking we should just redefine enterprise. It's not about social enterprise anymore, social enterprise is a fantastic model but it sits within a vehicle called enterprise. And what about if we just got all enterprise, whether it's community enterprise, whether it's social enterprise, whether it's for dividend enterprise to actually be more impactful. And why shouldn't we look across the whole spectrum? Because the power of impact will solve our issues. It will identify what we value in our communities and in our countries and in our globe and it will help us figure out what is actually the right approach to enterprise. So what we're trying to do is figure out what that means as Akinna, what that means as a partner now to the New Zealand Government. What that means in New Zealand and Aotearoa and what it means is our voice on the international stage. And one thing we've really learnt is God we've got to stop talking at the disco. We've got to stop talking to people who already get it. You are all in the disco, kind of sick of talking to people at the disco no matter how wonderful you are. The action that we need to take is let's talk to people outside the disco. Let's get more people in the disco. Because if we don't, we constantly stay on the margins and that's not acceptable anymore and I can guarantee you my mum wouldn't have been pleased with that. And I bet your mum and your grandmother wouldn't have been pleased either. We just need to expand the disco. We need to make the disco inclusive. We need to make the disco accessible and we need to celebrate being at the disco. So how do we do that? It's kind of audacious, it's kind of big and as a small organisation with about 26 people we can't do it alone and nor should we because we only represent the 26 people inside our organisation. So we need to be representing and connecting and telling the stories of those who are making the impact who are benefiting from the impact or actually more importantly the people who need the impact. So what we need is a strong voice. We need to be collective. We need to stop attacking each other and saying that your social enterprise is better than mine or what we should be doing is focusing on the impact and telling those stories better. What we also need as a result of that is the capability to deliver more impact. We need to be able to, if we want to make a profit, we need to be able to have the support to make better financial decisions which will enable us to make better impact and be able for us to know that that impact is what our societies need. Too long we hear about, too many times we run workshops where people are amazing intentions, beautiful intentions, but they don't understand the problem. They don't understand where their problem sits in society as a whole and they certainly don't understand whether their impact is the thing that's actually needed. So how do we help people know that? And that's not our kina's role, that's everyone's role. That's communities themselves feeling confident and proud to actually say what their strengths are and be able to find enterprise or just the ability to share what they know and share what they do well and make that something that their community themselves are proud to be associated with. Like any enterprise, and I think there's been a few call-outs already for it, is we need access to capital. We need access to the right capital at the right time in order to be able to grow and scale. It's really difficult because there's no lack of capital out there. It's not available at the right time. It's not available with the right skills and we need to value the impact that capital should be returning, not just the financial return. We also need to really harness the power of procurement. I joined our kina two and a half years ago and prior to that I got given a whole bunch of money to do things with kids. About $25 million. It was great. I got a rugby player who had a helicopter and we could do lots of cool stuff and I felt wonderful. Was it impactful? Sure. Was it enough? Absolutely not. That $25 million was granted out of a sense of community need. It was granted by people who thought it was the right thing to do. Tap can be turned off pretty quickly. In a corporate world it's not the corporate social responsibility budgets we should be looking at. It's the spend in the procurement markets. And the reason for this is last year New Zealand businesses spent $561 billion in expenditure. Billion. Imagine if impact was the thing that was most valuable in that spend. That's transforming an economy right there. So what we want to do is harness this power. We want to make the reason for spending that money not about the financial benefit or the cost control. We want to make it focused on the impact it can deliver. Because why shouldn't it? In Auckland in three years' time there's going to be two major events. One is APEC and one is the America's Cup. The budget for APEC is $260 million. It is kind of outrageous but that's a whole nother talk. Why shouldn't APEC and America's Cup clean up the hauraki? Why shouldn't it result in jobs that are high paying for young men and women in Ōtara? Why shouldn't it? Because if we don't ask that question now, if we don't say that's what we demand as a society you can guarantee people at MFAT, Auckland Council are not going to feel the need to do it. They don't understand it's possible and what we want to do is show them and support them to unlock that potential, unlock that legacy. And how we're doing that is we've just launched last week New Zealand's first marketplace for social procurement. Certified social enterprises being connected with corporate central and local government buyers. If we can unlock this $561 billion we not only create the opportunity for sustainable organisations to have access to a market but we actually impact inside four dividend businesses. For them to understand that there's a different and more appropriate way for them to run their businesses we're not saying that they need to become social enterprises because we like the term social enterprise and we like what it means to us. But what we want to do is really drive businesses to understand the power that they have and how can they unlock that through procurement. What we are also doing is through our partnership with the New Zealand Government is creating a conversation and my call to action to all you hear is bring your skills, bring your passion, bring your opinions and make them really challenging opinions and join us on our journey. We've launched the impact initiative which is in partnership with the Community Enterprise Network Trust here in Aotearoa to actually start understanding what we need to have impactful enterprises throughout New Zealand that deliver not only impact into their own communities but tell a different story about who we are as enterprises across Aotearoa and into the world. So what we would love you to do is join us on that journey, challenge us on what you think we are doing right, wrong or not doing it all, but make sure that your voice is heard because the worst thing that can happen as we go through this journey is that we don't understand what people want or incorporate people's voice within the work that we're doing. So my call to you is please come and join us. There's many of us round here over the rest of today but you can find all our details on the impact initiative and please help us transform the New Zealand economy by harnessing the power of impact. Kia ora.