Vodafone New Zealand Foundation Joins GlassPockets

Vodafone New Zealand FoundationGlassPockets Road to 100

Meet Our New GlassPockets Foundation: An Interview with Lani Evans, Foundation Manager, Vodafone New Zealand Foundation

This post is part of our "Road to 100 & Beyond" series, in which we are featuring the foundations that have helped GlassPockets reach the milestone of 100 published profiles by participating in the "Who Has GlassPockets?" self-assessment. This blog series highlights why transparency is important, how openness evolves inside foundations over time, helpful examples, and lessons learned.

The Vodafone Foundation has been giving globally since 1991 and the New Zealand Foundation is one of 27 Vodafone Foundations around the world. In New Zealand, the foundation has been working since 2002, and focused on youth development since 2007. Over that time, it has invested more than NZ $28 million in local communities.

Vodafone New Zealand Foundation is dedicated to creating a thriving and prosperous Aotearoa New Zealand, where all young people can live lives they value. According to Treasury New Zealand, there are 210,000 children and young people who don't have access to the resources and support they need to grow into the great adults they want to be. Vodafone New Zealand Foundation wants to change that.

The Vodafone New Zealand Foundation is among our newest GlassPockets participants. Lani Evans, Foundation Manager, explains why the foundation takes the time to make transparency a priority.

GlassPockets: Why is Vodafone New Zealand Foundation prioritizing foundation transparency?

Lani EvansLani Evans

Lani Evans: For us transparency is all about relationships. We're a relational funder, and we want to have high-trust relationships with our community partners. We want them to be open and honest with us – to tell us the positive stories of change, but to also tell us when things are difficult, when a program isn't working as expected, or when our behavior is impacting their efficacy. We can't expect that level of transparency from them, if we're not willing to offer it ourselves.

Transparency is also a way of holding ourselves to account. By being transparent, we give communities and organizations the opportunity to see the full picture, to understand us and, if they want, to critique us. It helps to redress the power imbalance that exists between funders and grantees.

GP: Given competing priorities and often relatively small staff teams, why should corporate grantmakers make transparency a priority?

LE: One of the challenges we have in corporate philanthropy is a community perception that we are limitless in our resources! And while I absolutely wish that was true, the reality is that we have limited funds available, and strategic boundaries on the types of projects we can support. We've found that increasing our transparency, and publishing things like our policy documents, staff information and financial accounts, actually reduces our workload. The transparency allows people to more clearly understand our capacity, our focus areas, and what we will and won't fund. That means we're receiving fewer requests that we are simply unable to fulfil, which is good for the community and good for us.

GP: How did the GlassPockets self-assessment process help you improve or better understand your foundation's level of transparency, and why should your peers participate?

LE: The self-assessment process revealed a few really basic gaps in the information we were providing. It helped us to think about what might be missing and prompted us to include some easy extras that provide important context, like statistics on diversity and copies of our policy documents. It was a simple and useful process.

It also prompted us to discuss transparency in our team meetings – what it means, why it's important and how we can continue to improve our practice, particularly in our data collection, annual report and yearly website reviews.

GP: Since ideally, transparency is always evolving and there is always more that can be shared, what are some of your hopes for how Vodafone New Zealand Foundation will continue to open up its work in new ways in the future?

LE: Getting better at evaluating our own effectiveness is the next step for us. As an organization we have a big, hairy, audacious goal – we want to halve the number of excluded and disadvantaged young people in Aotearoa New Zealand by 2027. Right now, we're grappling with what that actually means and how we'll know when we get there. It's an exciting time – there's a lot of work for us to do, and some big challenges ahead, but I'm excited to share our progress, as well as our learnings along the way.

-- Janet Camarena&nbsp

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