Community foundation leaders move decision power from donors toward the communities they serve
Community foundation leaders in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand are shifting decision power from donor-directed giving toward community agency. At the Community Foundations Aotearoa New Zealand conference in Hamilton in September 2026, Michelle Baldwin, Georgia Mathews, Co-CEO of Community Foundations Australia, and Sam Henderson, CEO of Northern Rivers Community Foundation, presented the Adaptive Lifecycle Framework. It has four stages: Emergent, Growth, Durable and Renewal.
The change is about who gets to make decisions, not only who receives money. Speakers said more than once that Māori wanted to help build solutions instead of being shut out of decisions. Financial capital was presented as only one of seven forms of community capital, so authority that rests on the balance sheet alone loses its claim to speak for a community.
Source: Alliance Magazine · October 5, 2026