With the wind down of the Orientation Aotearoa Charitable Trust in 2016, the Trustees elected to gift their remaining funds to The Gift Trust to provide contestable grants to individuals or entities in New Zealand, for work that aligns with the OA vision.
The Gift Trust ran two open grant rounds in November 2016 and May 2017 and we have now donated all the remaining funds.
Each application was assessed by The Gift Trust according to the OA criteria: helping build resilient healthy communities, supporting rites of passage and youth development, providing experiential education and nurturing relationships and community development.
The First Round
In the first round The Gift Trust received seven applications and made grants to two organisations. A $4,000 grant was given to Living Economies Trust in collaboration with Project Lyttelton to run a three-day expo in Lyttelton from 29 March to 1 April 2017.
Living Economies Expo – Speaker Session
A $4,000 grant was made to Toru Education Trust who provide courses in permaculture and sustainability that nurture people, planet and spirit. The grant supported students where finance was a barrier in attending their workshops. These funds also provided seed funding for the development of Toru Education Trust, for marketing materials, a website and newsletter.
Toru Education Workshop
To read more on these recipients, read a more in depth blog post here.
The Second Round
In the second round The Gift Trust received eleven applications and made grants to six applicants.
Rites of Passage provides conscious, community-led and nature based Rites of Passage programmes for young people. They received a grant of $4,500 to buy a large community tent to hold their events, as their current one has reached the end of its lifespan.
“Rites of Passage events assemble communities of up to 40 people to create a contemporary rite of passage, a community celebration that supports families and young people.”
– Rites of Passage
Showing Up, a newly founded organisation, are a self development organisation offering coaching and support to young people trying to find their place in the world. They received a grant of $2,000 to run three youth focused but intergenerational sessions and to document their learnings.
There were four individuals that received a total of $2,725 of grants in the second round. We supported two applicants to attend Lifehack’s Flourishing Fellowship programme to further their work with youth. One applicant was supported with the costs of attending ‘Beyond Words’, a three month storytelling course at Emerson College, UK, and another was helped with funding to self publish a collection of nine mini-essays heavily inspired by their time at Orientation Aotearoa.
Cindy Lees Story
Cindy manages a sexual assault service in the Eastern Bay of Plenty. She received a grant to help her attend Lifehack’s Fourishing Fellowship Programme. The training programme helped Cindy to develop her youth work skills and to develop prevention initiatives that will make the young people of her community safer.
Cindy is developing a safety app called CONNEKT NZ. Young people can use the app if they feel unsafe and it will alert their pre-registered contact person. Its currently in its first prototype stage. If you would like to test this prototype and offer your feedback, please do so by clicking on the image below, which will take you to their Facebook page with instructions.
We are delighted that our grant helped Cindy and others to continue their work helping vulnerable young people in NZ.
