Billy Graham Youth Foundation – Utilising ‘VAP’ to Support its Mahi
The J R McKenzie Trust added a ‘value added payment (VAP)’ to its philanthropic kete as a result of a strategic review that occurred in 2008/09. The Trust had moved to multi-year grantmaking and was investigating how it could have an ongoing relationship with groups and provide additional value outside of initial funding.
VAP applies to Impact Grants and offers up to 10% of the original grant value. It acknowledges that opportunities might arise because of outcomes from the original funding, and additional support would help groups take advantage of those or respond to things that weren’t known at the beginning of the funding cycle. VAP has been used for things such as attending learning conferences, providing access to valuable networks, intellectual support, and evaluation of programmes and initiatives.
A great example of how VAP has been utilised is the Billy Graham Youth Foundation (BGYF). Billy and Kerri Graham established the Naenae Boxing Academy (NBA) in 2006 with a vision of giving back to the community that Billy had grown up in during the 1950s. In 2018, BGYF was launched as the national body designed to support communities who choose to use the NBA model to care for their young people.
BGYF’s purpose is to:
support local communities throughout Aotearoa New Zealand to champion young people by providing top quality resources, relationships, pathways, and structures.
provide resources and learnings to support the establishment and operation of top quality, community-focused boxing gyms.
combine its expertise in the sport of boxing with the principles of best practice youth development to engage with young people from every background. It does this by creating safe spaces, building friendships, and supporting its members to become champion people who contribute to their communities.
Today, BGYF consists of both Academies and Affiliates across four regions: Northern, (Auckland and Northland), Central (Waikato, Bay of Plenty and Taranaki), Capital (Wellington, Hawke’s Bay, and Gisborne), and Southern (encompassing the entire South Island).
BGYF sought VAP support from the Trust to undertake an evaluation of the mahi it was doing in these various communities. David Graham, Chief Executive Officer – BGYF explains why:
“Until establishing a clear and well-defined evaluation framework, we were making assumptions at both the local and national levels as to the impact our work was having. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that because good work has been done in the past that it will continue in the future. While the basic needs of young people are stable, the types of services that they are attracted to and the ways they engage with those services is ever changing. Because of this, we saw it as essential that we capture the insights of our members and weave that through every level of our local and national operation.”
From the outset, the BGYF team knew that it was crucial that they capture and incorporate the voices of the young people they were working with in the evaluation. For BGYF, it was the only way to approach their work.
“We saw this as a critical resource for our decision-making processes. Ensuring youth voice remains as an integral part of our mahi, we have also established a youth role on our national board, who is mentored by the individual who previously held that position. Young people hold insights that are exclusive to their age and stage; to continue building an organisation that serves them without such valuable insights would not be very smart at all!” says David.
BGYF recognised that the knowledge obtained through the evaluation would be fundamentally important to any changes that were made to its offering to young people and their communities.
“One key insight was that in our first year evaluation, the results showed that our female membership were not receiving the same levels of benefit as our male members. Having such clear and challenging insights gave our team something specific to aim at and problem solve. After implementing a number of targeted changes, we were very happy to see that the following two evaluation reports showed that the benefit received from our female membership had significantly improved.
One other key benefit was that with consistent and targeted feedback, our local and national community became comfortable with the discipline of critical analysis. Our community understand that the better we are at assessing our practice and listening to our members, the greater the long-term impact we will be able to have in communities across Aotearoa New Zealand,” says David.
It’s clear that when applied to a credible, well-considered project, VAP has an important part to play in supporting the success of programmes and initiatives offered by kaikōkiri. VAP acknowledges the partnership that exists between the Trust and ngā kaikōkiri and that the community partner is best placed to understand what is needed to add value to its work in order to progress positively.