Prime Minister Christopher Luxon at KiwiHarvest. The Government is planning a new Social Investment Agency that may offer help for charities like KiwiHarvest.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon at KiwiHarvest. The Government is planning a new Social Investment Agency that may offer help for charities like KiwiHarvest.
Angela Calver is chief executive of KiwiHarvest - a national food rescue organisation that collects surplus and donated food and distributes it throughout New Zealand to community organisations.
OPINION
Christopher Luxon visited our humble KiwiHarvest Auckland warehouse last week. We swept the floors, ironed our shirts, and practised our pitch. It was a chance to showcase the impact of our work - offering a lifeline to communities by redirecting edible surplus food from landfills to those in need.
As the Prime Minister toured the space, listening to our mission, it felt like an episode of Shark Tank. Running a charity often involves making a compelling case for investment, but this visit came with much higher stakes. With government funding to the food rescue sector slashed 87 per cent by the previous government, we needed this head Shark to understand the value food rescue offers his coalition. He has our fate between his teeth.
Luxon nodded in all the right places, appearing receptive to our cause, and I must say he was well informed and considered in his questions. My level of respect for him was definitely raised during his visit. However, the true test will come with Thursday’s Budget announcement where we’ll find out how much the Government is willing to invest in our kaupapa.
KiwiHarvest CEO Angela Calver is hoping for more government funding for food rescue charities in the Budget.
One beacon of hope is Nicola Willis’ announcement of the Social Investment Agency as part of the Budget. She says, “The Social Investment Agency will lead the development of social investment across Government, helping us understand who we need to invest in, what works for those people and how we measure progress.”
From 2025, the agency will also manage a Social Investment Fund to directly commission outcomes for vulnerable New Zealanders and to work with community, non-government organisations, and iwi providers.
For years, charities like KiwiHarvest have been doing crucial work with limited resources, striving to provide essential support to those in need. The establishment of this new agency promises to drive meaningful, positive change by ensuring that funding is directed towards initiatives that offer the highest return on investment (ROI) for social good. I like what I’m hearing.
Willis goes on to say, “We want to look beyond good intentions in our policy-making and use hard evidence to invest in what works. Our new approach builds on better social science evidence and advances in technology”.
Aotearoa has long needed a considered, evidence-based funding system for social services to ensure funds are allocated based on the measurable impact and effectiveness of initiatives. Like measuring happiness, positive change can be hard to quantifiably measure. Unlike the investments in Shark Tank, the returns in social investing are not financial but are reflected in the outcomes for communities.
Kiwiharvest - a service that rescues food that would otherwise be wasted from supermarkets for redistribution to people in need.
At KiwiHarvest, we’ve been measuring the impact of our model from the start. Since our inception, we’ve distributed 27 million meals, rescued 12 million kg of food, and avoided 32 million kg of CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere.
With $100 we can also rescue and distribute five times the amount of kai that would be bought at the supermarket with the same $100. While receiving on average 10 per cent of our funding needs annually from the government, we’d call that a pretty strong ROI.
KiwiHarvest supports 220 charitable organisations nationwide, with another 55 on our waitlist. The promise of a dedicated Social Investment Agency brings much-needed hope that our efforts will receive sustainable backing.
Although the fund won’t be operational until 2025, we see this as a positive. It allows us to continue forming the partnerships and refining our systems to ensure our social ROI is as optimised as possible. With careful planning and collaboration, we can potentially secure the resources required to maintain (or expand) our operations, reaching even more communities in need.
The nitty gritty will come out on Thursday, but for now we feel hopeful about what this agency represents: a big step towards a more equitable and supportive society. For organisations like ours, it paints a promising future where no good food goes to waste and no person goes hungry.
