Kaupapa/mission

Gift Collective is a NZ charity fundholder

Our kaupapa is to support projects with a charitable mission in Aotearoa, transforming how charity funding works through fundholding.

Not everyone with a great positive change idea has the capacity or desire to incorporate, register, and manage their own charity entity—but without one, you're locked out of funding opportunities. There is a very real gap, for marginalised communities especially, when it comes to the time, language, and specific knowledge required.

Simultaneously, many funders genuinely wish to reach further into communities, but face barriers because they simply can't fund unincorporated groups that don't tick certain boxes. Gift Collective is the bridge; we do the box ticking, benefiting both funders and grant seekers.

There are huge inefficiencies in the charity sector in Aotearoa. For every 10,000 people, there are about 15 charities in the US, 24 in the UK and Australia, and 60 in NZ. Each of those charities represents countless hours of admin and paperwork, time that would be better spent on their actual kaupapa. And how many are missing from those stats altogether because they couldn't even start?

By mutualising legal and financial structures as a shared resource, we can relieve admin burdens, increase access, and help our limited charity dollars to go further toward what really matters.

A lot of groups are already using Open Collective around the world, like meetups, open source software projects, community initiatives, grassroots citizen movements, mutual aid groups, sector or interest-based coalitions, and projects receiving grants. What they have in common is being collectively organised, valuing transparency, and needing to get up and running quickly and easily without getting bogged down in paperwork and admin. But Aotearoa is unique, and The Gift Collective is new, so who knows what will emerge!