#297 'Founding A For Purpose Distribution Business', Dan Leverington founder The Ocelli Group

Welcoming back Tara Arnold, Head of Grant Making at ShareGift, to Purposely Podcast. Sharegift is a UK charity built around an idea most people have never heard of: collecting donated shareholdings that are too small to sell, pooling them together and distributing the proceeds to good causes. The model was created thirty years ago by founder Claire McIntosh, a stockbroker who noticed the waste sitting in small, unwanted share parcels. Today, a team of five has given away close to 70 million pounds, with all grants unrestricted and no impact reports required. When Tara rings a charity to let them know money is coming, she hears the relief in their voices. Tara also works as a fundraising consultant, supporting small charities through Unbound Philanthropy and Lloyds Bank Foundation. It means she understands the funding relationship from both sides, and that perspective runs through everything she talks about in this episode. Her fundraising career started in 2001 with face-to-face fundraising, moved through trusts and legacy roles, and sharpened into a specialism around compelling grant applications. Her thesis has always been that good proposal writing is part craft and part alchemy. You collect everything you need, you speak to the people whose lives the work touches, and then you bring it all together into something that reads as human. That last part, she says, is what most applications get wrong. If it does not feel human, you will not get a look in. This episode is full of practical insight for anyone working in fundraising or grant making. Tara talks about how Sharegift actually finds charities to support, and it is not always through traditional channels. She describes discovering organisations through Google searches, LinkedIn and even maps. She talks about the reality of pitching to funders, including a memorable moment in a room at St James's Place Foundation where she clocked that her ten-page proposal had been reduced to a single paragraph, and had to think fast. Her advice: always recap your project at the start of a pitch, regardless of what you think the panel has already read. She is also candid about the state of the UK charity funding environment right now. She started fundraising just before the 2008 financial crash, and says that felt like child's play compared to what smaller organisations are facing today. Frontline charities are dealing with rising costs, shrinking grant rounds and funders changing criteria mid-cycle. Against that backdrop, the unrestricted, no-application model that Sharegift runs feels more valuable than ever. The conversation closes on the funder-plus model, where grant makers offer capacity building alongside financial support. Tara's consulting work sits squarely in that space, helping small charities strengthen their income generation, review applications, sharpen their storytelling and think harder about stewardship. Her recurring observation from across all of it: most charities just need to do the basics well. Read what the funder has asked for, and do that. Key Themes - How Sharegift works and why unrestricted, no-application funding matters more than ever - The alchemy of a great grant application and why human writing beats polished writing - How Sharegift finds charities, and what that tells fundraisers about their digital presence - Pitching to funders: what really happens to your proposal before it reaches the room - The UK funding crisis and what it feels like from inside a grant making charity Funder-plus models and the case for investing in fundraising capability This episode of Purposely is brought to you by Benevity and Trust Investments.

In this SHORT episode of Purposely, we are back with Gary Stannett, CEO of the Rio Ferdinand Foundation, on the realities of setting up and running a charity attached to a famous name, and why getting it right matters far more than most people realise.Gary is direct about something the sector doesn't always say out loud: putting a well-known name on a charity is a brave thing to do. Charities are more publicly exposed than most organisations. Anyone can look up the finances, the governance, the trustees. When the name above the door belongs to someone famous, that scrutiny goes up considerably.He talks through how the foundation came together. Gary had crossed paths with Rio Ferdinand when Rio was playing at West Ham and Gary was running programmes in nearby Elephant and Castle in South London. When Rio started exploring the idea of setting up a charity, Gary found himself in the room helping explain how it would actually work, including pushing back on assumptions about government funding that weren't going to materialise. The introduction was informal, the process was long, and what Gary told Rio at the start turned out to be true: the foundation would look very different in the long run from what anyone imagined at the beginning.A lot of athlete-led charities, Gary explains, either go quiet or wind up fairly quickly. Often it comes down to the athlete not fully understanding what running a charity actually involves, or not having the right people around them from the start. The Rio Ferdinand Foundation took a deliberate approach to building its board, reviewing trustee skills every year and making sure key areas are covered: legal, financial, youth and community development, civil rights, business, and higher education. It is not the most glamorous part of the work, but Gary is clear it is the foundation that makes everything else possible.The broader point Gary makes is one that applies well beyond celebrity charities. Setting up a charity sounds straightforward. It rarely is. The governance responsibilities, the public scrutiny, the financial oversight, and the ongoing need for care and momentum, none of it switches off once you start. Anyone thinking about it needs to go in with their eyes open.Key Themes• Why putting a famous name on a charity raises the stakes for governance and scrutiny• How the Rio Ferdinand Foundation came together, and what Gary told Rio at the start• Why many athlete-led charities struggle or close, and what makes the difference

Welcoming Dan Leverington, founder of The Ocelli Group, to Purposely Podcast.The Ocelli Group is a for-profit business built around a clear purpose: connecting organisations that need to do sustainability work with the right partners to deliver it. Dan sits in the middle, not as a consultant doing the work himself, but as a connector who understands both sides of the equation and knows how to bring them together. The name comes from the secondary visual system bees use to navigate by the sun. It is a fitting metaphor for a business built on seeing just over the horizon.Dan grew up around mining and heavy industry in Australia, which gave him an early and unromantic view of how extraction economies work. A university project on the Murray-Darling Basin introduced him to ecological economics and the idea that threats to nature carry real economic consequences. That tension between industry and environment has run through his career ever since.His path to founding The Ocelli Group ran through engineering recruitment in Queensland's LNG sector, tech startups, time in the US, and a co-owned media company focused on B Corps and renewable energy businesses. Across all of it, the same pattern: he was always the person in the middle, figuring out who had the problem and who had the solution. When mandatory climate reporting began to create urgent demand for sustainability partners across Australia, he saw a gap that matched exactly what he was built to do.The business model is built on referral fees from partners rather than charges to clients, which keeps the value exchange clean and the incentives aligned. Dan facilitates the introductory calls himself, which means he gets to see in real time whether his read of both sides was accurate. His first deal closed in three weeks. He is candid that nothing since has moved that fast, and that the first 18 to 24 months were difficult as the market caught up with where he could already see it heading.This conversation covers the realities of building a connector business from scratch, including the trust problem people warned him about, the discipline required to work both sides of a marketplace simultaneously, and what it actually feels like to leave a stable career and back your own thesis. Dan talks about the weight of that decision on his family, the importance of honest timelines, and how he learned over time to give himself permission to step back.He is also the host of the Green Fix Podcast and the author of Honeydrops, a weekly newsletter that started with six recipients and has since become a platform for making sense of the sustainability landscape in plain language. Both have become genuine business development assets, not just content for its own sake.On ESG, Dan is direct. The term takes a kicking, he says, because leaders have spent careers putting difficult things in the externalities bucket. What is changing is that those externalities are starting to sit on the balance sheet. Key ThemesWhat it means to build a connector business, and why the model works when trust is earnedMandatory climate reporting as a market catalyst and what it revealed about the gap Ocelli was built to fillWhy ESG gets a kicking, and how to have the sustainability conversation in a language that moves CFOsThe reality of founding a business: bumpy not linear, and the weight it places on familyBeing too early: the upside of arriving before the market is readyContent as a business asset: Green Fix Podcast and the Honeydrops newsletterFrom coal country to climate economy: the career arc behind the businessThis episode of Purposely is brought to you by Benevity and Trust Investments.

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Welcoming Kate Sclater, Head of Community Investment at Rātā Foundation, to Purposely Podcast. Rātā Foundation is one of twelve community trusts acrossAotearoa New Zealand, formed following the deregulation of the banking sector in the late 1980s. With a fund of around $700 million, it operates in perpetuity across Canterbury, Nelson Marlborough and the Chatham Islands, striving for an equitable and sustainable society under the kaitiakitanga of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Its name comes from the Southern Rātā tree, a flowering native that lives within an ecosystem and lifts those around it. Kate grew up in Exeter, Devon, in a low-socioeconomiccommunity. At eleven, she was awarded a scholarship to attend a private school, an experience that gave her a daily, lived view of inequality. Walking between two worlds shaped a belief that would carry through her entire career: whatphilanthropy gives people is not just money. It is belief in themselves. Her early career in the UK took in the National LotteryCharities Board, where she ran a small grants pilot designed to reach the parts of the voluntary sector other programmes had not reached. She recalls a man in Plymouth who received a grant of two and a half thousand pounds to bring acommunity together around a football, who later secured six million pounds of European regeneration funding for his neighbourhood. The lesson she carried from that: remove barriers, meet people where they are, and enable them tobelieve what is possible. Twenty-two years ago, Kate arrived in New Zealand with herpartner. Her first role here was with St John, before Canterbury's twin crises, the earthquakes and the 2019 mosque shootings, shaped much of what Rātā became.In both cases, the foundation's pre-existing relationships with funders, iwi and council meant they could respond within days, not weeks. Kate is clear: you cannot build those relationships in the moment of trauma. They have to existbefore the crisis arrives. At Rātā, Kate has helped develop a community investmentapproach that sits across a full range of tools: grant funding, multi-year partnerships, capability building and impact investment. Their current strategic focus areas are health, housing, education and environment. Housing has been the primary focus for their impact investment work, using construction financing, revolving credit facilities and equity placements to support affordable rental and progressive home ownership. The outcomes are tangible. Afamily that had moved fourteen times in ten years now has a stable home. The educational and health outcomes that follow from that stability are what intergenerational change actually looks like. The conversation also covers the AI capacity-building workRātā has supported through the Nelson AI Sandbox, helping community organisations use the technology ethically and practically, including for multilingual communication, grant writing and data collection. Kate talks abouta future in which AI might allow funders to have conversations with people that populate application forms, rather than requiring applicants to navigate written processes that can feel designed to exclude. What philanthropy actually gives people, and why beliefmatters more than moneyThe geographic reach and intergenerational purpose of RātāFoundationImpact investment as one tool among many, and why housingwas the right place to startResponding to crisis, the mosque shootings, the earthquakes,and why relationships have to come firstStarting again: arriving as a migrant and starting againAI, the digital divide, and how the community sector cankeep upHolding purpose tightly and method lightly This episode of Purposely is brought to you by Benevityand Trust Investments.Key Themes

In this SHORT episode of Purposely, we’re back with NedWills, on an unexpected place his community engagement journey began, and what it taught him about ethics, incentives, and connecting elite sport to grassroots impact. Ned’s eyes were first opened to community work through anunlikely route: working in the oil industry in the early 2000s. Large infrastructure projects in unstable parts of the world meant companies had to invest heavily before seeing any return, which made getting community relationsright a genuine commercial priority, not just good PR. That put Ned at an unusual intersection of sponsorship and community engagement early in his career. What struck him most was the people. Despite working for anindustry that’s easy to criticise from the outside, he found many of his colleagues to be genuinely community-minded, regularly navigating real ethical dilemmas with care. There was a constant tension between commercial pressure todeliver shareholder returns and a genuine desire to make sure the impact on local communities was a positive one. That early exposure to ethical complexity has stayed withNed throughout his career, and it shows up clearly in his work today at Laureus Sport for Good. The Laureus World Sports Awards bring the glitz, but the real work happens at the other end of the scale entirely: taking the inspiration andpassion the world feels watching athletes like Lewis Hamilton, Novak Djokovic and Usain Bolt, and channelling it into young people navigating war, violence, gang crime, and lack of access to education and healthcare. The question Nedkeeps coming back to is how sport’s emotional power can be harnessed to help young people change their own lives, and their communities, for the better. This episode of Purposely is brought to you by Benevity and Trust Investments.Key Themes

Welcoming Liz Gibbs, CEO Burnett Foundation Aotearoa, to Purposely Podcast. Burnett Foundation is the organisation on a mission to get New Zealand to zero HIV transmission by 2030, while ensuring LGBTQ+ communities have the best possible health and wellbeing.The conversation starts with the foundation's origin story. Formerly the New Zealand AIDS Foundation, it was set up 40 years ago by three men, including Bruce Burnett, a New Zealander who returned home from San Francisco with HIV and chose to travel the length of the country talking openly about the epidemic at a time when almost nobody else would. His advocacy, and the work that followed, has saved lives and helped shape New Zealand's response to HIV ever since.Liz talks about where New Zealand sits globally, doing comparatively well with around 95 locally acquired cases in 2024, but still around 15 years behind best practice when it comes to access to modern medication. She covers the science behind U equals U, undetectable equals untransmittable, and the gap between what the evidence says and what the law still allows, including current criminalisation settings around disclosure.Liz reflects on growing up in a household shaped by her father's experiences in India, an upbringing built around curiosity, openness and an instinct to help, and how that led her into a career spanning Save the Children, Philanthropy New Zealand, Selwyn Foundation and now Burnett Foundation.Towards the end, the conversation moves into impact investing and innovation. Liz talks about the Burnett Foundation's current Innovation Challenge, which is inviting community organisations, technologists and social entrepreneurs to bring new thinking to old problems, and shares lessons from a similar initiative at Selwyn Foundation that led to a successful equity investment in a New Zealand tech company.This episode of Purposely is brought to you by Benevity and Trust Investments NZ.

In this SHORT episode of Purposely, we’re back with Rose Challies – founder and director of Terra Nova Foundation – on the uncomfortable truths about how philanthropy actually works, and what it would look like if funders finally put people at the centre.Rose has a view that cuts through a lot of the noise in this space: we’re not funding projects. We’ve never been funding projects. We’re funding humans to do change making. The sooner philanthropy gets honest about that, the sooner we’ll start backing the right things in the right ways.She’s direct about the damage done by short-term funding. A 12-month grant is effectively a six-month grant, because six months in, people are already scanning the job pages. The people holding up some of the most important work in our communities have no security, and the sector treats that as normal. Rose doesn’t.On the power dynamics in philanthropy, she’s clear-eyed. If you control resources that someone else needs, that is a power relationship, whether you intend it to be or not. The best funders understand this and work actively to shift it. The rest… don’t always notice.Rose also challenges the widespread assumption that philanthropic expertise is somehow optional. She compares it to medicine: we all have some understanding of health, but we don’t all call ourselves doctors. Understanding what poverty or environmental harm looks like from the outside is different from understanding how to change it. That distinction matters, and the sector doesn’t always honour it.And on the ‘no core funding’ trend she’s seeing from more and more funders: please pay the people doing the work. Even a contribution to someone’s salary, alongside others, makes a difference. Refusing to fund people while demanding their expertise and impact is, in Rose’s words, the biggest travesty in the sector right now.Key Themes• Why philanthropy funds people, not projects – and why we should say so• The real cost of 12-month grants and the insecurity baked into charity work• Power dynamics in funder-grantee relationships – and how to navigate them• Philanthropic expertise as a genuine discipline – not a nice-to-have• The ‘no core funding’ trend and why it undermines the sector• Backing change makers directly: what it looks like and why it works• The difference between administrative grant making and change making philanthropy• New Zealand as a place to try things – and why that opportunity is worth protectingThis episode of Purposely is brought to you by Benevity and Trust Investments.

Welcoming Helen Hughes to Purposely Podcast, Chief Executive and Tai Oroni of Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari, one of New Zealand's most remarkable conservation stories and the world's largest pest-proof fenced sanctuary, sitting in the Waikato near Cambridge.3363 hectares of restored native forest. 47 kilometres of predator-proof fencing. Kiwi, kokako, giant weta and hundreds of native species finding their footing again in a forest that had lost its voice. The ecological work at Maungatautari is extraordinary. But this conversation is just as much about the human story behind it, and the very real challenge of keeping something this significant financially alive.Helen came to this role after a life that took her from London investment banking to IT support, insurance, a sausage roll factory, and eventually the government's billion trees programme. It was not a straight line, and she is the first to say that the foundation for where she is now was not laid in her childhood but in a period of profound personal loss that sent her into the forest to heal.In this conversation Helen and Mark get into the origin story of the sanctuary, how a community in the Waikato took an audacious idea and built something the world has not seen before, and the relationship with iwi that sits at the heart of everything the sanctuary does. The process of tono, iwi to iwi conversation before any translocation takes place, is one of the more quietly moving things discussed in the episode.Helen also talks openly about what she walked into as CEO. A funding model that had not kept pace with rising costs, a significant operating loss, cash flow at times sitting at just two weeks, and a team that needed steadying. She made the call to go public with the financial reality and talks about why that was the right decision even when it was a hard one.From there the conversation moves to what she has done to turn things around: growing the tourism business, building out the native nursery, creating on-site accommodation, developing an education programme that now reaches thousands of students a year, and exploring the early promise of biodiversity credits as a potential new way of funding conservation at scale. She is clear that the work is not done and that the pressure is constant.What comes through is someone who cares deeply about the place, is clear eyed about the challenges still ahead, and is not short of determination to see it through.This episode of Purposely is brought to you by Benevity and Trust Investments NZ.

In this SHORT episode of Purposely, we’re back with Duncan Matthews – founder of Good Numbers – on funder reporting, the pain of being a volunteer treasurer, and why small charities deserve better tools.Duncan opens with a familiar frustration: tier four charities – those under $140,000 in annual expenditure – are everywhere in Aotearoa (around 15,000 on the charities register alone), yet virtually no software has been built with them in mind. Small in money, perhaps. But not small in impact.He talks about the reality of funder reporting – and how wildly it varies. Foundation North makes it simple.Gaming trusts? Not so much. Some require receipts, bank statements, and proof of every expenditure. That’s hours of work, printing and highlighting and photo-taking, just to stay compliant and keep the grants flowing. Good Numbersis built to make that whole workflow dramatically easier.And then there’s the treasurer problem. Duncan has sat on four nonprofit boards at once – because the role isa “guaranteed vacancy.” Nobody wants it. It’s not because people don’t care; it’s because the tools make it needlessly hard. The xRB reporting standards that arrived in 2013 were a step forward, but most small organisations still struggle to match their old categories to the new ones. Duncan’s insight: if complex tasks can be made easy in other parts of life, why not here?Good Numbers is his answer – a purpose-built tool that turns bookkeeping and funder reporting from a chore into something close to effortless. Because more time on compliance means less time on mission. And that’s a problem worth solving.•   Why tier four charities are underserved – and what’s atstake when reporting feels impossible•     The xRB reporting standards that changed everything,and why many small organisations still struggle•      The real cost of funder reporting – from gaming trustrequirements to highlighting bank statements•    Why the volunteer treasurer role is a “guaranteedvacancy” – and how to change that•   Good Numbers: bookkeeping built for small charities,not adapted for them•   Making compliance easier so organisations can focus onwhat actually mattersThis episode ofPurposely is brought to you by Benevity.Find Duncan and Good Numbers at goodnumbers.nz – including a free 15-minute demo booking.Key Themes