Hi, I'm Robin Scott. I'm the chief executive of Philanthropy New Zealand. Welcome to Ta Pa Pa, Tonga Rewa, to the Philanthropy New Zealand Conference – Philanthropy Through the Looking Glass.
My favourite part so far has been catching up with some of the international conference attendees.
This is my first attendance at Philanthropy New Zealand Conference, so I've come with great expectations.
I really enjoyed the plenary session because it was great to hear from the Roundtree Foundation and to hear what their perspective is.
And clearly we've all got to keep learning.
I think it's a reinforcement rather than a learning of a very complex nature of what we're all trying to do in our different ways in the Philanthropic sector.
I think because we don't always get a chance to sort of sit back and reflect, coming together like this is really useful to learn a little bit about how other people are trying to do things.
I've been really amazed at how open everyone is and the participants and everyone seems to be here to have a really genuine motivation and to be really open to learning, so I've really enjoyed that.
The most fun thing at the conference has been co-facilitating the youth session and what a wicked group of people in terms of the speakers as well. It was amazing.
And I really enjoyed the youth session today to be honest. I thought it was really good because it makes you think about what you're going to do when an application comes in about listening to youth, about making sure you action what they want and where they're at.
I had a really inspiring time at the conference so far. I've learnt that there's a much greater diversity in the organisations represented at Philanthropy than I had imagined.
For me, the real big things that stand out is that there's economic capital, social capital, cultural capital, you know, all these things, you link them together and achieve big things, so that's what that means.
Well, I think the interaction between the different trustees and the different philanthropic organisations has been really beneficial because they all come from a slightly different perspective, so that's been useful.
Well, I've learnt a lot about things that we are already doing and some new things about evaluation, some new issues about looking at the way you make grants.
A lot of the organisations here would be sort of high engagement funders. The nature of my organisation is lower levels of engagement but much greater volume and I think there's a real place for some collaboration there.
One thing that I'm going to do differently is make an effort to do even more looking outwards at other projects and use those reflections to come back and improve the projects that I'm working with.
I want to run more sessions with our grant partners, our charity partners around telling good stories and how to get the story out there.
I'll look more seriously at the benefits of Twitter.
