Executive Officer 's Update - Annual Report 2025
Published on 20 May, 2026
From the Momentum Waikato Annual Report 2025 - see full report in PDF.
By David Christiansen, Executive Officer of Momentum Waikato.
While 2025 was a tumultuous time across the world, the Momentum Waikato team had a year of considerable and consistent progress on our core strategic initiatives.
Global markets held up well amidst the economic turbulence, which meant good returns for our endowed funds, 10.1% for the year, and in turn, generous distributions to the many great causes we support across the Waikato and Coromandel region.
It was also a good year for strengthening our own financial resilience, as we continue to steward our reserves with care.
The wider for-purpose sector however continues to be challenged with reduced funding and donations. The demand out there in our communities is unfortunately only growing, and therefore so is the need for more and better designed philanthropy and generosity, to grow support for the social services addressing ever-increasing hardship.
With that in mind, we are now offering more ways for people who are looking to increase the long-term impact of their charitable donations to access our community foundation ‘smart giving’ model when they don’t have the large sum needed to start up their own endowment fund.
Recognising that many want to support their local area, we have started launching ‘place based’ funds, with the Cambridge Community Fund leading the way, followed by six ‘Coromandel Future Funds’, all enabled by some superb support from keen local Fund Champions. These are great vehicles for receiving donations and bequests of any size and frequency and, in time, they will really boost community funding in their respective parts of the region.
Then, recognising that people also want to tackle specific issues and opportunities, we are developing a set of purpose-based ‘focus funds’, to offer grants to groups and projects in the relevant sectors.
These will be based on our nine ‘Special Focus Areas’ of Health, Education, Environment, Tangata Tiriti, Sport & Recreation, Arts & Culture, Animal Welfare, Children & Youth and Community.
The ‘Momentum Waikato Arts, Culture and Creativity Fund’ was launched as the first of these new Focus funds in late 2025, to coincide with the completion of the Waikato Regional Theatre. This was thanks to a generous and anonymous founding donor, who wanted to extend our ‘Share the Stage’ agenda beyond the bricks-and-mortar of the Theatre building itself.
As further such catalysts eventuate, we will launch the rest of these Focus funds designed to support the people and organisations that sustain and nourish our communities and help them thrive.
To offer people the opportunity to create their personal and family legacies, we have also launched our Gifts-in-Wills programme, centred around creating a Professional Advisors Network.
Aotearoa has a relatively low level of charitable giving in Wills via bequests. As a society, we need to grow that, especially given the looming inter-generational transfer of wealth over the next 20-25 years, estimated to be around $1.6 trillion in New Zealand. Increasing the number of Wills with a charitable element by just a few percentage points would be transformational for the funding of the for-purpose sector.
A key audience for this message is lawyers, accountants and investment advisors. The development of a Professional Advisors Network, ‘PAN’, has therefore been a priority.
We thank Debbie Stevens, who was our Relationship Manager from mid-2024 through to late 2025, for her sterling work building the foundations for this programme, including an excellent panel seminar called ‘An Evening of Connection and Conversation’ at the Hamilton Gardens in November 2025.
This has all been a lot of work for the small but mighty team here at Momentum. Atop ‘BAU’, to have completed the Share the Stage fundraising for the Theatre, established the strategic new funds and a further five ‘named funds’, and kick-started the ‘PAN network’, has been massive.
An incredibly successful year, so a big thank you to Janice, Andrea, Mark, Michelle and Debbie for their commitment, energy and professionalism.
The core Momentum team: Mark Servian, Andrea Jones, David Christiansen and Janice Lapwood.
