Looking at Four Winds

I’ve fallen off the grid of late so I do apologise.  Truth is its hard doing this stuff and seeing nothing happen.  I do feel its important to try and hold people to account, but with so little change happening it’s a little disheartening.  And I was looking at Four Winds and just got bored.

Which is surprising.  Four Winds are a pokie funder who gave just over $200k in six grants over 18 months to Angel Children’s Education Foundation.  Of course you will remember Angel from such headlines as:
Million dollar library never opens yet claims small fortune in community funds and
The $1 million library that never really opened appears to close for good

So I had high expectations for me: some considerable outrage and agitated typing and boring my friends with outlandish tale.  But no.  The grants to Angel do seem to be outlier(ish).  I’ve looked at their published grant distributions, downloaded, cleaned and categorised.  Unfortunately they only have published from April 2019, so we only have five years of grant data.   Their financial year ends 31 March, so my years are 1 April to 31 March. 

They are really quite general in distributions which is really helpful for those seeking grants.  In the five years under examination they have provided grants to over 2,100 community organisations, at an average grant of $9,400.  As at the end of 2023 they had 25 venues and gave away $13.4 million in the last financial year.

If we look at this from the system level, that's about 4% of the total pokie market by grants given. 

I have copied the below information from their website:

Four Winds Foundation funds are available for activities that provide benefit to a significant portion of the community in a non-commercial sense. The type of charitable organisations that the Foundation envisages assisting generally falls within the following descriptions:

• Sporting clubs/teams
• Cultural (e.g. performing arts, historical societies and cultural groups)
  
• Philanthropic (organisations that are there for the benefit or welfare of the community e.g. health, foodbanks)
• Educational groups
• Groups who serve community purposes (e.g. scouts and senior citizens )
  
• Other groups that align to our funding criteria not specifically mentioned above
  

A couple of rules they have (again copied from their website):

• Only 4 grant applications per applicant will be considered in any 12-month period‍
• Only 1 grant application per applicant will be considered in any month
  
• An important requirement for funding is the provision of a signed set of the organisation’s annual financial accounts in the application.
  

Looking at where their grants are actually applied, 46% are going into Sport.  This is actually quite low for a pokie, although it must be remembered that often the grants to schools are for sport and I usually categorise them as Education.  Still, nice to see a real balance into all community groups.  I haven’t analysed the declines, but the data is there if anyone wants a crack at that.

You know I love having a look at where the Sports grants go.  The luckiest code is football (see this blog for what happens in that sector), although that’s tapered off a little of late.  Runner up was rugby union, with basketball nipping on their heels.  Impressive to see Netball in the top 10! 

We can also look at the communities that Four Winds funds into.  Not surprisingly, the top is Auckland and Wellington, but there is a fair bit headed to national organisations.

Funding regions are of course driven by where the venues are: as at 31 Dec 2023 45% of Four Winds machines are in the Auckland region.  They also lost 50 machines in the 2023 year, which explains why their 2024 donations are down.  This loss is regular churn rather than venues closing.
 
Another view is of course who they give grants to.  Below is the top 20 organisations over five years of data.  By and large fairly mainstream although Lower Hutt AFC may be feeling the pain. 

I thought I’d also have a wee look to see if they comply with their stated criteria.

In terms of numbers of grants per annum, I’ve cut the data to see the top 10 in terms of number of successful grants.  So yes, by and large they do stick with their criteria of no more than four grants in any one year, with one exception, which could be a timing issue.   

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Looking at the next criteria: that a signed set of accounts is included in the application: sorry but I didn’t reconcile all the grants against the date they were incorporated, nor if they have submitted accounts to the Charities Commission.  However, I did see a one name (of a few) that popped out to me: NZ Sports and Community Development Trust registered with the Charities Office 20 September 2023 and received funding from Four Winds of $40k in two grants: one in the six months April 23 – Sept 23, and one in Oct 23 – March 24.  So they look to have not followed their stated policy in this instance. NZSCD have also received considerable start up grants from Blue Sky, Dragon, Rano and Akarana according to Granted.govt.nz: just over $400k in total.  Not saying anything is wrong here: now it could be that they are helping an organisation to start up, but if I were in charge I’d have hard look at this.

I write about this stuff as believe that as need to understand where funding comes from, where it goes, and how it gets there.  No one else seems all that interested.  As a citizenry we allow both those supplying money and those asking for money to operate, and as a community we need to ensure we have oversight over the organisations they choose to fund.   Love to talk with you if you think this is at all interesting, and if you want to dive into the data a bit more than happy to do so. Check out my website http://www.delfi.co.nz/