Hoku Foundation is a private philanthropic foundation. We support organisations in Aotearoa New Zealand to improve and grow their impact in youth employment, community housing and waste reduction.

Each year we work with a small number of organisations and seek out leaders with a growth mindset and who share our aspirations for a high performing charities sector. 

We recognise it takes an entire organisation to deliver impact and that our partners know their field of work better than we do. So we seek to learn, align on their outcomes, and fund them flexibly over multiple years. 

We also believe that achieving maximum impact requires active management. This means regularly collecting and reviewing data (in all forms), analysing and drawing insights, and using this to make decisions and improvements to strategy and services. We do this ourselves underpinned by our own theory of change. We want to learn about what it takes to be effective across our funding areas and are keen to work with others who can share what’s working and what they are learning. 

The Foundation has a big mandate and a very small team. So we do not accept unsolicited proposals. We continue to develop and expand our networks to find organisations that are a good fit and who want to work with us. Our job is to find great organisations and our approach to due diligence is holistic.