Funding Purpose: A new type of partnership

This is a story about how we’re creating a values-based partnership, and how funding purpose rather than projects can help solve digital inequity in Aotearoa. 

Digital Future Aotearoa (DFA) are excited to announce a new partnership with InternetNZ. The two organisations are working together to solve the digital divide in Aotearoa – the gap that exists between people who are able to have meaningful digital lives online and those who are not. A partnership may not seem like exciting news, but don’t click away just yet. This is a story about how we’re creating a values-based partnership, and how funding purpose rather than projects can help solve digital inequity in Aotearoa. 

What does partnership mean?

There is a history of collaboration between the two organisations, with DFA as the grant recipient and InternetNZ as the funder. While the grant-by-grant funding relationship enables a lot of good projects in the digital inclusion space, it did not allow for the collaborative and responsive approach that both organisations believe is needed to address the digital divide.

The term “partnership” implies equal influence in a relationship, which is not always present in a grant-by-grant funding model. The grant writer, often a charity or individual, has to convince a funding body that their project will meet the funding body’s mission. This means the grant writer must be focused on the goals of the funding body, often over the goals of their own organisation or those of the communities they serve. Often the criteria of a grant doesn’t quite fit a charity’s project. In many cases everyone’s goals align, but in reality charities often end up prioritising the funding body’s goals in order to keep the lights on.

Writing a grant application can also feel like trying to predict the future – it involves identifying a set of activities, staffing and resources for a particular project. Funding in this way can limit the ability for a project to adjust to unforeseen events, such as a global pandemic, or to adapt to new information about how a project will best benefit a community. Maybe a project is funded for a series of workshops in New Zealand’s main centres, but after funding is won, new information shows the workshops would have more impact if run in the regions. Many grants do not allow organisations to adapt on the fly.

“To change a system’s structure
takes a complex, dynamic
and long-term solution”

This is not to say that the grant-based model doesn’t have its place for discrete projects with clear activities, that planning isn’t important, and that some grants aren’t flexible in how they are spent. Grant-by-grant funding is perfect for projects that solve siloed problems – for instance the way Creative New Zealand funds artists to complete a movie or book. Different communities need different types of support, and often an organisation cannot know what every community needs in advance – we find that out as we form relationships within each community. 

The digital divide is a systemic problem that is interconnected with other systemic issues such as racial and economic inequality (as well as factors such as age and geography). To change a system takes a complex, holistic and long-term solution – it can’t happen in a single project. It takes funding purpose and acknowledging the power imbalances that created the system in the first place.

Systemic change must be collaborative and curious

The Ashoka Learning and Action Centre’s research report Seven Steps for Funding System Change looks at how funding can best support systemic change. Pip Wheaton Co-Director Ashoka UK writes:

From this research it became clear that funding system change requires some fundamental shifts: from funding programs to funding people, from short-term projects to long-term purpose, from symptoms to systemic strategies, from quantitative metrics to quality relationships, from fixed outcomes to curiosity and learning, and from individual initiatives to collaborative ecosystems.

For DFA, it’s a prescient quote. In the last few years, we’ve begun to understand that for our mahi to be successful in reducing the digital divide that we need to focus on the qualities Wheaton identifies – long term purpose, systemic strategies, quality relationships, and curiosity and learning. Incorporating these qualities into our programmes has meant addressing the unconscious bias of the Pākehā paradigm under which we have worked – trying to create top down, one-size-fits-all programmes. 

“For our mahi to be 
successful we need
to focus on
... curiosity and learning”

In 2019, DFA visited a Code Club in Uawa (Tolaga Bay). While at Uawa, we were invited to kōrero with Uawa kaumātua about the history of the area, visit local landmarks, listen to stories about life on the East Coast, and learn about the educational charity set up in Uawa to help their tamariki. The experience of being curious and listening helped us recognise that our approach and project delivery strategies were structured in this top down way and based in a primarily Pākehā world view, which would prevent the programmes creating meaningful impact in communities most affected by digital inequality. 

In terms of digital inequality – like all inequality in Aotearoa – research shows that Māori and Pasifika communities are overrepresented. The Government’s Digital Inclusion Action Plan 2020–2021 estimates “that one in five people in New Zealand lack at least one of the four elements needed to be digitally included – motivation, access, skills or trust.” A 2019 DIA commissioned report from Motu Research “identified Māori, Pacific peoples, people with disabilities, seniors (especially those over 75 years), those not employed or actively seeking work, and people living in larger country towns as groups where particular effort should be focused” in order to address the digital divide. 

To this end, the initial focus of the DFA–InternetNZ partnership will be focused working with Māori and Pasifika communities, especially outside of the main centres, to develop programmes that are community-led, support self-determination and each community in the way it needs. 

While change takes time, our move towards curiosity and listening has already positively affected our programmes and people. We are grateful for all of the support that InternetNZ has given us over the years, and that they are partnering with us in this important mahi. We look forward to developing a partnership that is values-based, adaptive, ongoing and able to be responsive to the communities we both want to serve.