Ākina is an impact development consultancy service that helps businesses, government agencies, social and community enterprises uncover the best ways to tackle challenges like poverty, inequality, environmental degradation and climate change. We recently reached out to them in an effort to support their work with social enterprises.
After hearing from their Director of Capability Building Roschelle Marshall about her work and sharing what our partner project Gift Collective can offer, it became apparent that we could be a useful service for some of the social entrepreneurs under her wing. We put together a presentation explaining how Gift Collective works as a charitable fundholder and what we can offer and pitched it to twelve social entrepreneurs gathered by Roschelle. The people we spoke with all had a charitable aspect to their social enterprises, so we made sure to draw a clear line between the business and charity sides of social enterprise. The attendees were a great bunch and had a lot of good questions.
We’re pleased to have a continued relationship with some of these attendees, and have since welcomed two of them to the Gift Collective whānau:
- Fitness Sci Tec has a vision of providing “accessible, targeted and evidence-based fitness and nutrition services to help address non-communicable diseases unfairly impacting our Māori and Pasifika communities”.
- Girl in Motion Foundation is launching an in person, group coaching programme to help women in West Auckland experiencing hardship start a service-based business.
Another two attendees have also expressed interest in starting Collectives under Gift Collective. We hope to be able to onboard the other two groups soon, and look forward to seeing the awesome mahi we know all of these collectives will do.
