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“This financial year Hui E! has put together one global funding application. That’s all we have time for.”

Rochelle Stewart-Allen, Kaiwhakahaere Matua, Hui E!

It’s no secret that as community leaders running community organisations we are involved in a constant quest for funding. We pour our hearts and souls into our mahi, projects, and programmes, and we know that financial support is vital to bring our ideas to life. But let’s be real – the traditional method of applying for funding from multiple sources is a real drain on our time and energy.

That’s why we’re making a change at Hui E! Community Aotearoa. We’ve decided to shake things up and change the script ourselves. This year, we’re introducing a unified global funding application. Yes, that’s ONE application for ALL funders for the WHOLE year.

When I was travelling around the motu last year with Vu Le, I felt very over asking, educating, driving, challenging, disrupting and cajoling for funding change. Over the past few years at Hui E! we have published research, written white papers, published blogs, spoken to funders, been on advisory groups, presented at conferences, run events, spoken to media, had individual funder meetings ALL TO HELP SHIFT FUNDING TO BE MORE EQUITABLE AND ACCESSIBLE FOR ALL OF US. This is both for the 115,000 community groups around the country, but also for Hui E! as we’re constantly in the midst of the ‘Funding Hunger Games’ ourselves.

(As an aside, we deliver so much at Hui E! with such a small resource (4.0 FTE!) that multiple people have told me they thought we had 20 kaimahi. Quite frankly, some days it feels like we’ve delivered the work of 20 kaimahi with our small resource!!)

Anyways back to the ‘Funding Hunger Games’. So, this financial year Hui E! has put together ONE GLOBAL FUNDING APPLICATION. That’s all we have time for. We’ve made a considerable investment of time and resourcing to put this together to accurately represent our mahi.

This ONE GLOBAL FUNDING APPLICATION will sit alongside our Annual Impact Report, Audited Accounts and External Evaluation. If funders need more information, we’ll point them to our Hui E! website, our social media channels, and our Charities Registration listing. They can chat with any of our stakeholders. They can even go on our YouTube channel and literally watch some of our webinars to see how we operate. That’s A LOT of information which we believe accurately and comprehensively demonstrates our mahi and the support we provide to thousands of community groups around the motu. It also requires the funders to take on the load of due diligence.

We were definately inspired by Dunedin Community Builders’ resource, Be the Change, to literally … yep, you guessed it … BE THE CHANGE WE WANT TO SEE. Our communities don’t have time to wait for more equitable and accessible funding and neither do we. So, at Hui E! we’re going to focus on what we do best – supporting community groups to deliver their mahi at a grassroots level. This will be instead of spending our time (well, mostly my time) writing multiple funding applications for multiple funders.

FUNDERS: If you’re reading this, and you are trying to drive systems change yourself, please reach out to Hui E! to support this change. You can be one of the first funders off the block to recognise ONE FUNDING APPLICATION as a viable option for time-strapped community groups.

COMMUNITY GROUPS: We’re also putting the call out to other groups to JOIN THIS MOVEMENT. Design your own global funding application for the year and be the change you want to see. Get in touch if you want to kōrero and we can share how we did our one.

We’ll continue to share this journey for Hui E! as we go so stay tuned for updates.