Looks like I now take requests. My one regular reader asked me to have a gander again at Rātā Foundation, which is Canterbury, Marlborough, Nelson and Chatham’s Community Trust. This Trust was set up by Central Government almost forty years ago when the regional Trust Banks were sold to Westpac. The money was then put in a perpetual trust. Government then appoints trustees to oversee both the investment, and the distribution of monies.
I wrote about Rātā last in 2021. My moans then still apply: copied below.
First things first: I’m moaning about the data. I use publicly available information, and over the years its got worse in terms of disclosure. Two years ago multi year grants were identified and the time span given. Now, not so much. This year I am throwing in the towel over allocating multi year funding over several years as I’m having to make far too many assumptions. What this will do is mess up the view of sector allocations on an annual basis. So the chart below shows the multi year allocations 2018 and 2019, but sadly not 2020. I’m not sure that this will affect the story at a high level, but will mess up if I start drilling down too much.
I’ve also given up on trying to figure out if spend is for operational purposes or capital. This information used to be published, now its not. It’s a shame, as is helpful for understanding funding of community assets. Grant decisions used to be published within weeks after the decision was made: now we have to wait for the annual report, in some cases up to 17 months, to see how the community funding decisions are made. Another useful piece that gaming trusts publish but these guys don’t is declined applications. That helps to give a view of where the organisation is making resource trade-offs and in my nerdy opinion can be pretty interesting.
So, nerd that I am, I downloaded the grants, cleaned and classified the data. Only took a week. Below is the last eleven years of Rātā grants (backing out the $25m Special Earthquake fund). What is rather interesting here is the drop in sport and the rise in community and economic development, which is 2020 made up around 38% of grants made. Over the last seven years the average was 29%. Sporting clubs are not the flavour of the month at the moment: in 2024 Sport made up 8% of all grants, in 2014 that figure was 18%. I have no issues with this. Sport has plenty of places to go to for grants: many pokies are set up specifically for sport grant making.
I wrote about Rātā last in 2021. My moans then still apply: copied below.
First things first: I’m moaning about the data. I use publicly available information, and over the years its got worse in terms of disclosure. Two years ago multi year grants were identified and the time span given. Now, not so much. This year I am throwing in the towel over allocating multi year funding over several years as I’m having to make far too many assumptions. What this will do is mess up the view of sector allocations on an annual basis. So the chart below shows the multi year allocations 2018 and 2019, but sadly not 2020. I’m not sure that this will affect the story at a high level, but will mess up if I start drilling down too much.
I’ve also given up on trying to figure out if spend is for operational purposes or capital. This information used to be published, now its not. It’s a shame, as is helpful for understanding funding of community assets. Grant decisions used to be published within weeks after the decision was made: now we have to wait for the annual report, in some cases up to 17 months, to see how the community funding decisions are made. Another useful piece that gaming trusts publish but these guys don’t is declined applications. That helps to give a view of where the organisation is making resource trade-offs and in my nerdy opinion can be pretty interesting.
So, nerd that I am, I downloaded the grants, cleaned and classified the data. Only took a week. Below is the last eleven years of Rātā grants (backing out the $25m Special Earthquake fund). What is rather interesting here is the drop in sport and the rise in community and economic development, which is 2020 made up around 38% of grants made. Over the last seven years the average was 29%. Sporting clubs are not the flavour of the month at the moment: in 2024 Sport made up 8% of all grants, in 2014 that figure was 18%. I have no issues with this. Sport has plenty of places to go to for grants: many pokies are set up specifically for sport grant making.
Looking at a single year’s grant making is a little tricky with Rātā : as mentioned they do a bit of multi year funding (which is great: should reduce cost to serve for those getting the grants) but don’t disclose – at least that I could find – who receives it and how much (not so good). As a result, I will look at the last three year in the below work.
The biggest beneficiary of Rātā funding is the organisers: Sport Canterbury, Sport Nelson. We have a few venues with support, and then the usual suspects: rugby, cricket, basketball, boating, netball and football. But a big surprise to me is the support of boxing: in the last three years Rātā has given $365k to various boxing entities. They have given a tidy $395k over the past five years to the Canterbury Brain Collective so I guess the consequences of the boxing funding is taken care of.
The top ten funded organisations in 2024 are below: as previously stated some of this will be operational funding in a multi year, and some capex.
The biggest beneficiary of Rātā funding is the organisers: Sport Canterbury, Sport Nelson. We have a few venues with support, and then the usual suspects: rugby, cricket, basketball, boating, netball and football. But a big surprise to me is the support of boxing: in the last three years Rātā has given $365k to various boxing entities. They have given a tidy $395k over the past five years to the Canterbury Brain Collective so I guess the consequences of the boxing funding is taken care of.
The top ten funded organisations in 2024 are below: as previously stated some of this will be operational funding in a multi year, and some capex.
Charity |
2024 Grant |
Hokotehi Moriori Trust |
$500,000 |
Tasman Environmental Trust |
$450,000 |
Terra Nova Foundation |
$385,700 |
Ngati Mutunga o Wharekauri Iwi Trust |
$379,741 |
CORE Education |
$337,562 |
Stopping Violence Services (Christchurch) Inc |
$335,000 |
Community Law Canterbury/Te Ture Whanui O Waitaha Inc |
$315,000 |
Nga Hau E Wha National Marae Charitable Trust |
$300,000 |
St Lukes Samoan Assembly of God |
$300,000 |
Te Ora Hou Otautahi Inc |
$300,000 |
Grand Total |
$3,603,003 |
Sport isn’t where its at for Rātā however. You may be scratching your head over the Community and Economic Development flag. Yes it’s a catch all, and yes it will include multi year funding or capital. I can’t tell the difference from the published documents. Below shows the top 10 organisations who have received funding in the past three years from Rātā :
Yep some big licks: housing sucks a fair bit up. So its not just me as a taxpayer, or me as a ratepayer helping out with social housing: its also me as a Canterbury citizen.
Last time too we had a skew towards the Nelson Marlborough area. Top of the South has about 23% of the population Ignoring multi-region (another reporting change) the amount staying in Canterbury over the last three years fluctuated between 69% and 76%. To be fair the Chathams, which of course has a very small population, did pick up a large slice of funding in the 2024 year: you can see that in the $500k to the Hokotehi Moriori Trust.
Because I have the data I thought it might be fun to look at Rātā ’s numbers of grants over the past 11 years. I did notice when I was cleaning that there was a large number of new organisations getting support. And while there is nothing wrong with this, I suspect that (again) we have a bunch of duplication going on with well meaning people starting their own thing rather than work with an existing entity.
In the 11 years I have data, Rātā has funded some 2633 entities, in 9721 grants. 35% of all entities getting funding only did once. The number of grants has more halved from 1240 in 2014 to 568 in 2024 while the amount given has increased by a total of around $2m. So we have fewer entities getting more money.
Let me know if there are any other grant insights you’d like. I'm keen to explore cost to serve so have had a look at a history of operating financials. This analysis EXCLUDES fund management costs, and takes the total admin cost and divides by the dollar value of grants given. In 2017, the costs per grant made were 16.16 cents. This means that for every dollar given, it cost 16.16 cents to get that dollar into the community. In 2025, that cost has gone to 21 cents – up about 25%. Looking at it another way, if we divide total admin costs by the NUMBER of grants then in 2017 the cost per grant was $3,247. In 2024 it is $7,882. This is less concerning (I think) given they now give MORE to FEWER organisations AND have introduced a multi-region tag which means where three grants were published before there is now just one.
My interest was piqued by a Matt Nippert piece in the Herald looking at New Zealand’s highest paid charity executives. We had a couple of grant makers in this list: not Rātā. My maths puts that the average salary of the top 4.2 staff at Rātā (as per their accounts) was $192k. That does seem like a wodge of cash, especially when they paid their fund managers $4.7m to manage the $675m under management. And if we look back to 2017 the average was $134k. So that's a 43% increase in top salaries since 2017. For reference, according to my scratchings from Stats NZ data, private sector salaries rose by almost 20% over this period. According to Google's AI the average CEO salary of a NZ NFP is $123k.
Below is a wee benchmarking exercise looking at entities which give away money, how much it costs to get a dollar out the door, total funds under management and top staff costs. I tried to take only the costs of grants, excluding investment costs and running costs in the case of the pokie. I looked at the two grant makers identified in the Nippert article, and a couple of other grant makers. The first three entities all have the same model: they are legacy Community Trusts. Central Lakes Trust manages some pretty sizeable energy assets (and I couldn’t unpick those costs from the Trust costs so their cost to serve is inflated), Tindall Foundation is a family trust with a fair whack of cash in Warehouse shares, and Pub Charity is a pokie whose costs of course are controlled by legislation. Its also just from the grant maker angle: those seeking grants have costs too which will increase the cost to serve.
Last time too we had a skew towards the Nelson Marlborough area. Top of the South has about 23% of the population Ignoring multi-region (another reporting change) the amount staying in Canterbury over the last three years fluctuated between 69% and 76%. To be fair the Chathams, which of course has a very small population, did pick up a large slice of funding in the 2024 year: you can see that in the $500k to the Hokotehi Moriori Trust.
Because I have the data I thought it might be fun to look at Rātā ’s numbers of grants over the past 11 years. I did notice when I was cleaning that there was a large number of new organisations getting support. And while there is nothing wrong with this, I suspect that (again) we have a bunch of duplication going on with well meaning people starting their own thing rather than work with an existing entity.
In the 11 years I have data, Rātā has funded some 2633 entities, in 9721 grants. 35% of all entities getting funding only did once. The number of grants has more halved from 1240 in 2014 to 568 in 2024 while the amount given has increased by a total of around $2m. So we have fewer entities getting more money.
Let me know if there are any other grant insights you’d like. I'm keen to explore cost to serve so have had a look at a history of operating financials. This analysis EXCLUDES fund management costs, and takes the total admin cost and divides by the dollar value of grants given. In 2017, the costs per grant made were 16.16 cents. This means that for every dollar given, it cost 16.16 cents to get that dollar into the community. In 2025, that cost has gone to 21 cents – up about 25%. Looking at it another way, if we divide total admin costs by the NUMBER of grants then in 2017 the cost per grant was $3,247. In 2024 it is $7,882. This is less concerning (I think) given they now give MORE to FEWER organisations AND have introduced a multi-region tag which means where three grants were published before there is now just one.
My interest was piqued by a Matt Nippert piece in the Herald looking at New Zealand’s highest paid charity executives. We had a couple of grant makers in this list: not Rātā. My maths puts that the average salary of the top 4.2 staff at Rātā (as per their accounts) was $192k. That does seem like a wodge of cash, especially when they paid their fund managers $4.7m to manage the $675m under management. And if we look back to 2017 the average was $134k. So that's a 43% increase in top salaries since 2017. For reference, according to my scratchings from Stats NZ data, private sector salaries rose by almost 20% over this period. According to Google's AI the average CEO salary of a NZ NFP is $123k.
Below is a wee benchmarking exercise looking at entities which give away money, how much it costs to get a dollar out the door, total funds under management and top staff costs. I tried to take only the costs of grants, excluding investment costs and running costs in the case of the pokie. I looked at the two grant makers identified in the Nippert article, and a couple of other grant makers. The first three entities all have the same model: they are legacy Community Trusts. Central Lakes Trust manages some pretty sizeable energy assets (and I couldn’t unpick those costs from the Trust costs so their cost to serve is inflated), Tindall Foundation is a family trust with a fair whack of cash in Warehouse shares, and Pub Charity is a pokie whose costs of course are controlled by legislation. Its also just from the grant maker angle: those seeking grants have costs too which will increase the cost to serve.
Missing quite deliberately is Christchurch Foundation. They had a lot of coverage down here a while back for some big salaries, and to be honest they don’t really give away that much. Their salaries have been brought back a lot since then, but still: the job of the CHC foundation, I would argue, is a lot harder than a perpetual trust like Rātā . As anyone in the philanthropic game will tell you, it’s a lot easier giving the money away than getting it in in the first place. Also missing is any local or central government benchmarking: those figures are well buried. What’s Lotto’s cost to get a buck out the door? Christchurch City Council’s? I’d hazard its probably a bit higher than this. And I have seen some very high cost to serve in some smaller lawyer run funders: sometimes the management cost is more than what they give away. I admit to being a little surprised at the similarity of cost to serve and top staff costs across the Community Foundations. I suspect they likely all use the same reports around remuneration: although that’s likely not the NGO category that is benchmarked. If Rātā could do the job for Pub Charity's cost to serve, then as a community we'd be almost $2m better off. Is the extra cost worth the result? I don't know. Thoughts?
I write about this stuff as I believe that we need to understand where funding comes from, where it goes, and how it gets there. 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. Shout out for any requests, and check out my website http://www.delfi.co.nz/
I write about this stuff as I believe that we need to understand where funding comes from, where it goes, and how it gets there. 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. Shout out for any requests, and check out my website http://www.delfi.co.nz/
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