Summary
I came home from Brisbane with plenty to think about after attending the Philanthropy Australia Conference in September 2026. The conference asked some big questions about what philanthropy is for, who gets to decide and what responsibility comes with holding wealth. These are the ideas that have stayed with me, and the questions I think are worth carrying into our work here in Aotearoa. They cover belonging, trust, risk, community leadership, advocacy, AI and the future we are helping to create through the decisions we make now.
The questions I brought home
More than 1,000 people gathered in Brisbane for the 2026 Philanthropy Australia Conference, under the theme Mobilising Generosity, Shaping the Future.
Over three days, we covered a lot of ground. How generosity is changing. The forces shaping our future. What wealth is for. What we owe to the generations who come after us.
A few questions kept coming up:
What is philanthropy for?
Who gets to decide?
Whose risk matters?
What would we fund differently if we trusted communities more?
What responsibility comes with holding wealth?
What would the world look like if the problems we fund were actually solved?
And are some of the structures we have built around philanthropic money getting in the way of what that money is meant to make possible?
At the Len Reynolds Trust, we have been moving towards relationship-based funding, fewer restrictions, longer-term support and a greater willingness to back community leadership and advocacy. Much of what I heard felt familiar and encouraging.
There were also plenty of reasons to look harder at our own practice. It is quite possible to believe in all of these things and still have habits, processes and assumptions that work against them.
These reflections draw on the sessions I attended, my notes and Philanthropy Australia's conference reporting. They are the ideas I am still turning over, and the questions they raise for those of us working in philanthropy here.
1. Generosity and belonging
One of the findings from the 2026 World Giving Report is that six in ten people around the world gave money during 2025. People in Asia and Africa were the most likely to give, and people in Africa gave the highest proportion of their income on average.
That alone gives us something to think about when we assume that generosity follows wealth. What interested me most, though, was the connection between giving and belonging. In countries where more than 80% of people felt a strong sense of belonging to their local community, people gave an average of 1.7% of their income. Where fewer than half felt that connection, the average was 0.6%.
These are country-level comparisons, so they cannot tell us what causes what. They did leave me wondering why greater national wealth might fail to translate into greater generosity. Could weakening connections and declining participation be part of the explanation? If we feel less connected to the people and places around us, what happens to our sense of responsibility towards others? That has implications for what we value as funders.
Community houses, neighbourhood organisations, marae, arts spaces, youth groups, environmental groups, volunteering and community events can sometimes struggle to look sufficiently “strategic” on a funding application. Their work can be hard to fit into a neatly defined intervention with an easily measured result.
Yet these are often the places where people get to know one another, develop trust, build a sense of identity and come to care about what happens to others. Much of that grows through ordinary, repeated contact: showing up, being known, having something to contribute.
What if strengthening belonging and connection became central to how we pursued the outcomes we care about?
I can see the relevance across our work with tamariki and rangatahi, creativity, community wellbeing and climate resilience. Relationships, networks, leadership, culture and places to connect all help make that work possible.
We also need to ask who is left out. A group can be closely connected and still be difficult for someone else to enter. Whose identity is affirmed? Who feels welcome? Who can actually participate? Those questions belong in any conversation about belonging.
2. Stop loving the problem
Trista Harris of FutureGood offered one of my favourite challenges of the conference: philanthropy can become very good at “loving the problem”.
We research it. Gather data about it. Bring people together to discuss it. Build theories of change around it. Develop increasingly sophisticated language to describe it. We can spend a great deal of time doing all of that.
Harris asks us to spend more time imagining what the world looks like when the problem is fixed. She encourages organisations to develop an ambitious 30- to 50-year picture of the future they want, and then connect today's decisions to it.
There was something liberating about this. You can have a clear long-term direction and still adapt, experiment and learn as you go.
So many of our goals amount to making something less bad: reducing inequity, reducing homelessness, reducing environmental harm. Those are necessary goals. I also wonder what possibilities we miss when we spend so little time describing what good could look like.
What would it mean for every rangatahi in the Waikato to feel secure, connected and able to imagine a good future?
What would climate resilience look like in the everyday lives of our communities?
What would change if organisations serving marginalised communities could spend much less time proving their legitimacy to funders?
What would a philanthropic system grounded in Te Tiriti look like in practice?
A single trust will only ever contribute part of what those futures need. Having a clearer picture can still help us work out whether today's decisions are taking us in the right direction. Communities need to shape that picture too, with their own aspirations at its centre.
One of Harris' practical suggestions was to set aside around 5% of organisational time, funding or communications for thinking about what comes next. She also talked about “field trips to the future”: finding places where elements of the future we want are already happening, and learning from them.
A useful question for any funder is: if our work succeeds beyond our expectations, what is different in the communities we care about 20 or 30 years from now?
That gives us something to come back to when we make decisions about grants, investments, advocacy and where we put our time.
3. People do not live in portfolios
Joshua Amponsem's observation that “people don't live in portfolios” is one I think funders should sit with.
A young person dealing with housing insecurity may also be navigating disrupted education, racism, mental distress, transport barriers and a lack of connection. These things affect one another. Food security is tied to income, housing, health, culture and relationships. Life does not arrange itself around the categories in our funding strategies. We do need to make choices about where we focus. The difficulty comes when we expect communities to break their work into pieces that fit those choices, and lose sight of how it all connects.
Alongside asking whether a project fits our strategy, we could ask:
What else is happening around this issue?
Who else is involved?
What relationships make the work possible?
What support, capacity or connections are missing?
What is already working that we could strengthen?
Where could our contribution be most useful?
Those questions help us understand how an organisation's work connects with what others are doing. Relationships can reveal opportunities that an application form would never show us.
They can also leave gaps in our view. Some organisations become very familiar to us, while others stay outside our networks. If we are relying more on relationships, we need to keep asking who we have yet to hear from.
Our strategies should help us make thoughtful decisions while leaving enough room to understand life as people actually experience it.
4. What does trust change?
Trust came up throughout the conference. The discussions I found most useful asked what actually changes when it is present.
In the Transaction to Transformation: Trust, Power & Community-Led Change session, speakers explored what happens when decisions move closer to the people living with an issue. That has some fairly practical consequences:
more flexible funding;
longer commitments;
less duplicated reporting;
room to change course as circumstances change;
funding for leadership and the organisation itself;
using information organisations already collect;
and greater community influence over decisions.
Then there is the more uncomfortable question: how much control are we willing to share?
There were calls for boards to step back from individual grant decisions and for communities to have more authority. Foundations have real responsibilities for charitable purpose, stewardship and accountability. There is also room within those responsibilities to question which decisions need to sit with us.
Where does good governance end and unnecessary control begin?
For funders moving towards relationship-based approaches, there are useful things to explore:
Could some funding decisions be delegated?
Could people with lived experience help make particular allocations?
Could partners have greater authority to define success?
Could a small community-led funding pool give us a place to start learning?
Doing this well takes care. People need to know which decisions they can make, what resources are available and how differing views or conflicts of interest will be handled. They should be paid for the time and expertise they bring.
A good relationship with a funder can matter enormously. So can having a meaningful say in a decision. We need to pay attention to both.
5. Whose risk are we managing?
Risk was another recurring challenge.
As funders, we spend a lot of time thinking about reputational risk, financial risk, compliance and whether a grant will deliver what we hoped. We also need to consider what is at stake for the people seeking support.
There is a risk when funding arrives too late. When a leader burns out. When reporting and applications take up too much of an organisation's already limited time. When a promising idea goes nowhere because everyone is waiting for someone else to back it first.
There is a risk in leaving harmful systems unchallenged. In holding back resources while problems become harder and more expensive to address. In continuing as we have.
The First Nations closing plenary challenged us to look more carefully at those consequences. I found myself coming back to two questions:
· Who defines risk, and whose risk matters most?
· And can we responsibly afford to leave things as they are?
There is a practical way to bring this into our decisions. When considering a grant, we could look at:
the risk of funding;
the risk of declining or delaying funding;
who carries each risk;
whether our requirements pass risk onto a community organisation;
and which safeguards are actually needed.
Due diligence matters. So does noticing when a safeguard makes us feel more comfortable by asking someone with fewer resources to carry more of the uncertainty.
6. Generosity reciprocity and responsibility
The First Nations contributions brought a different depth to the conversation about generosity.
Lourdes Inga spoke about responsibility to community, Country and generations yet to come. That asks us to think about what we owe to the relationships and places that sustain us, and how we give back to them. Country, knowledge, community and relationships help make life and wealth possible in the first place.
Inga also challenged who gets a place at philanthropic decision-making tables, and who needs to make room. Her contribution left me thinking about how comfortable we are asking communities to be open and vulnerable with us, and how willing we are to do the same.
First Nations peoples bring distinct histories, knowledge and relationships to these discussions. Here in Aotearoa, we need to work through what these questions mean within our own history, Te Tiriti o Waitangi and relationships with tangata whenua.
What do generosity, reciprocity, stewardship and sharing power ask of a philanthropic trust operating here?
That question reaches into governance, investments, accountability, whose knowledge we value and who gets to define what good looks like. It asks for sustained relationships with tangata whenua and room for Māori leadership, knowledge and aspirations to shape how philanthropy works.
There is no way to do that well through a statement of intent alone. It takes time, ongoing learning and a willingness to be challenged.
7. What are we preserving wealth for?
Some of the deepest questions came on the third day, in discussions about wealth, stewardship and what it means to be a good ancestor.
Money depends on a great deal around it: trust, functioning institutions, stable communities, relationships and a liveable environment. As those things deteriorate, the usefulness of financial wealth changes too.
Healthy whenua, social trust, knowledge and strong communities can be difficult to put a price on. They are also among the things we most need to protect. For endowed foundations, this raises a difficult question. We talk about preserving capital for future generations. Those generations will also inherit the consequences of what we do, or leave undone, today.
The conference debate about spending down and operating in perpetuity brought that tension into focus. There are thoughtful arguments on both sides. A foundation that continues over generations can offer lasting support and respond to needs we cannot yet foresee. Spending more now may help address problems that will become much harder to shift if we wait.
Each foundation will need to work through that balance in its own circumstances. Every perpetual foundation should still be able to answer: what are we preserving our capital for?
I think about what the Waikato might look like around our endowment in 30 years. What will our communities and environment be like? What will today's decisions have helped make possible?
That brings our investments and grantmaking into the same conversation. Where the money is invested, how much we distribute and what we fund all shape our contribution. We should be able to explain those choices and revisit them as circumstances change.
8. Back the leadership already there
Community agency was another theme running through several sessions.
Communities bring knowledge, relationships, ideas, leadership, culture and solutions. Funding processes can make those strengths harder to see when people have to keep describing what is wrong, what is missing and how much they need help. In the closing plenary, Angel Owen spoke about trusting, supporting and resourcing First Nations communities to lead.
That asks something quite specific of funders. We can easily end up identifying the problem, deciding on the response, controlling the money, defining success and then asking communities to show they have done what we wanted.
We could begin with a different set of questions:
What is already working here?
Who is already leading?
What do people want for themselves and their community?
What is getting in the way?
What resources or authority would help?
What could we stop doing?
Backing that leadership may mean funding an organisation's kaupapa with fewer restrictions. It may mean giving people more room to make choices as things change. It certainly means looking at whether our own processes make their work harder.
We also have to accept that community priorities and approaches may differ from what we had in mind. That is part of what it means for communities to lead.
9. Fund the work that lasting change takes
Several sessions explored what long-term social change actually requires.
There are grassroots organisations, advocates, researchers, storytellers, organisers, lawyers, campaigners, community leaders and institutions. Their work connects in different ways, over time.
It can be easier to fund one organisation's clearly described programme than to understand and support those wider connections. Yet the work between organisations, and the effort needed to sustain a movement, can be essential to change.
This came through strongly in the discussions about advocacy, law reform and changing public narratives.
Reflections on the marriage equality campaign highlighted the relationships, skills and organising capacity that remained after the legislative win. That capacity could support the work that came next.
The encouragement to philanthropy was clear: fund advocacy and back law reform.
Australian Progress's Hearts, Minds, Power handbook is a useful resource for funders thinking about this. It explores investment in advocacy and systems change, including leadership, campaigns, research and organisational capacity.
There is also a question about how we use our own resources. We have money, of course. We also have relationships, networks, knowledge, reputation, investment capital, access to decision-makers and the ability to bring people together.
How could those be useful to the work communities are already leading?
We need to be careful here. Having resources can make it very easy for the funder to become the centre of the story. Community leaders need room to set priorities and speak for themselves. Sometimes our most useful contribution will be to open a door, stand alongside someone or provide steady backing while they get on with it.
10. Make bringing people together worthwhile
Funders can bring people into a room who might otherwise struggle to connect. We can make introductions, create space for learning and help people reach decision-makers.
That can be useful. It can also create another meeting for people who already have too much to do. Before convening anything, I think we should ask: what becomes possible because these people are together that would be difficult to achieve otherwise? Who wants the conversation? Who gets to set the agenda? Will it help participants do their work, and who will follow through afterwards?
The same applies to collaboration. Agreeing that collaboration is a good idea is only a beginning. Someone usually has to coordinate it, maintain relationships, work through disagreements and keep things moving. That takes time and needs to be resourced. Sometimes a funder can help most by making a connection and then giving people the space to take it forward themselves.
We should be able to explain why asking people for their time is worthwhile from their perspective.
11. Move at the speed of need
One practical reminder from the conference was that the speed of our decisions reflects how we have designed our processes. Philanthropy Australia highlighted Australian Communities Foundation's example of establishing a disaster relief fund within days, when a usual process might take months. It is worth asking what makes that possible, and what we can carry into our everyday work.
Every meeting, form, approval and reporting requirement takes time. What risk does it manage? Is the burden reasonable? Does the decision need to wait for the next board meeting? Could someone already have the authority to act?
Smaller funders can be particularly nimble. Organisations of any size can have clear delegations, sensible requirements and a way to respond when something is urgent. For a community organisation waiting on a decision, those choices can make a considerable difference.
12. AI power and inclusion
AI featured prominently at the conference, and Dex Hunter-Torricke asked philanthropy to think about its consequences for opportunity, information, employment, democracy and who holds power. There is plenty here for funders to get our heads around.
The Inclusive AI Pledge, developed by Champions of Change Coalition and Women's Leadership Institute Australia, draws attention to how historical bias can carry through into AI. Inclusion needs to be considered deliberately in how these tools are developed and used.
I took away three questions for philanthropy.
First, how are we using AI ourselves? What happens to privacy, bias and transparency? Does it help us understand communities, or put more distance between us?
Second, what do community organisations need to navigate these changes? Access to tools is one part of it. Time, skills, advice and the ability to make informed choices matter too.
Third, how do community voices influence decisions about technology that will affect their lives? Funders have a reason to be part of those conversations.
Environmental costs belong in this discussion as well. Energy use, inclusion, access and who benefits all need attention alongside the possibilities for greater efficiency.
A practical place to begin is to be clear about how we will use AI responsibly in our own organisations, and to keep learning with our partners. We should also pay attention to whether our use of technology helps people be heard or creates another hurdle on the way to a funding decision.
13. Look across our region and closer to home
There was a challenge to Australian philanthropy's habit of looking to the United States and Europe for ideas while overlooking work happening in Asia and the Pacific.
Climate, migration, education and many other issues connect Australia closely to its own region. Those connections deserve sustained attention and partnership.
There is something in that for Aotearoa too.
We can learn a great deal internationally. There is also important thinking and practice being developed by Māori, Pacific communities, local funders and community organisations here.
The size or profile of an overseas foundation tells us very little about whether its approach will work in our context. We need to stay curious about the knowledge and experience around us, including work that does not come with a large communications budget or an international audience.
I came away wanting to learn widely and pay closer attention to what is happening nearby.
14. Make time to learn
A final theme was the need to create time for reflection.
Philanthropy can get caught in the same cycle of constant activity as the community organisations we fund. More grants, meetings, strategies, reports, collaborations and initiatives. There is always something else that needs doing.
The World Giving Report's charity research reflected that pressure. Leaders can find themselves absorbed by daily demands, with little room to think longer term. Those able to create that space tended to feel more optimistic and secure about the future.
I think there is a useful discipline in putting regular time aside to ask:
What are we learning?
What are we hearing and seeing in community?
Which assumptions have changed?
What is working well?
What should we stop?
What is emerging that our strategy did not anticipate?
That time needs to lead somewhere. If we keep hearing the same feedback from partners, what are we going to change? If circumstances have shifted, which decisions need another look?
With changes in government policy, pressure on community organisations, climate change and new technology, making room to notice and respond feels especially important.
What we do with these questions
I left Brisbane encouraged by many of the conversations, and also feeling that philanthropy in Aotearoa has much more to contribute to them.
Some of the ideas being discussed felt familiar. In my experience, conversations here about relationships, trust, community leadership and sharing power are often further along. Our relationships with tangata whenua, and the ongoing work of understanding what Te Tiriti requires of us, have helped deepen that thinking. There is valuable experience here of working through what these ideas ask of us in practice.
I was disappointed to hear so few voices from Aotearoa. Across the sessions I attended, I saw just one New Zealand speaker. We have often been willing to push things forward here, and I think philanthropy is part of that. There was an opportunity to draw much more on the knowledge and experience of Māori, community leaders and funders from this side of the Tasman.
We still have plenty to question in our own work. We can talk about power while holding on to it, or community leadership while asking people to deliver a strategy we designed elsewhere. Our relationships with tangata whenua should keep challenging us to look at whose knowledge shapes our decisions, where authority sits and how we hold ourselves accountable.
One question I kept returning to was fairly simple: why do things that would feel unreasonable in an ordinary human relationship become accepted once funding is involved?
That is a question for us as much as anyone else. Knowing the communities around us, listening properly, funding people well, sharing decisions and being willing to act with some uncertainty all take time and judgement. They also require us to stay open to learning and changing our habits.
Harris’ invitation to imagine a better brings us back to the choices we make now. I came home wanting to keep stretching our own practice, and feeling that the experience we have in Aotearoa deserves a much stronger place in the wider conversation.
Further reading