Crowdfunding land stewardship in Regional Aotearoa
When Ness Radich first volunteered for EHF’s New Frontiers event in 2018, she did not imagine that the Fellowship would yield the networks and resources required to propel her own impact aspirations. “I just thought that New Frontiers was really cool, so I put my hand up. Then through volunteering and generally being way too enthusiastic, I met everyone and ended up getting offered a position as Event Coordinator for the following year.” In this role, Ness was able to form close relationships with the EHF Co-Founders and whānau, bonds which she says have been instrumental in the development of her own collaborative impact initiative, The Learning Environment.
For the last 18 months, Ness has been putting her enthusiasm and coordination skills to work at The Learning Environment’s living campus, a space which offers courses that heal, inspire and develop capacity for personal and collective resilience. “When you heal the land, you can heal yourself, and vice versa,” she says. “That socio-ecologial link is really strong. The Learning Environment has lots of different physical spaces and ecosystems that need healing. Through those spaces, we create opportunities for people to come and learn in a place-based way, and then share those learnings back out into their communities.”
At its home at Pīwakawaka Farm in Wanganui, The Learning Environment holds 70 ha of market gardens, wetlands, orchards and wilderness areas, all of which are used as outdoor classrooms for hands-on learning. Ness works there as one of seven Coordinators in a decentralised team with skills ranging from psychology to dance to ecological design. “The idea is that with every course that we do, there’s an element of human well-being. So you might come and do a horticulture-style course but there will always be a strong element of personal growth woven into that course. In a way, it’s also about re-learning old practices. You could be pruning an apple tree and also thinking about what else in your life might need pruning. What is inhibiting your own growth or would allow you to flourish? And also knowing that you won’t see the fruits of your labour right now. So, for a course like that, we’d have people returning for harvest season. It wouldn’t be a one-off; it might be two or three times over the year so they can see the seasonal changes.”
With Ness’ help, the Learning Environment has broken new ground for place-based learning by crowdfunding the land it occupies and placing it into a Charitable Trust. “We’re all young people in our 20s and 30s,” she says, “and so far we’ve all been volunteering our time to bring this vision to life. We knew that we didn’t want to come into this from a place of debt, so there was a lot to consider around legal land ownership and the options for how to approach it. This is a huge challenge for people approaching land stewardship around the country and around the world: the inaccessibility to secure land, despite having all the energy, skills and passion to care for it. We wanted to give people the ability to see life thrive and experience that evolution by visiting us more than once, a case study for what is possible.”
After a serendipitous meeting with the values-aligned owners of Pīwakawaka Farm revealed the physical space The Learning Environment so badly sought, the Coordinators put their energy into finding creative ways to purchase the land. When Ness joined the team early last year, she took on the funding branch of the initiative. “We explored mortgages, social loans and any other option we could think of.” They quickly realised that their ask did not sit comfortably within existing philanthropic models in New Zealand. “We knew we wanted unconditional ownership to sit within the Trust and for it to long outlast any of the original members of the team. We knew that we didn’t want to create a community there or live there and that we didn’t want any of the Coordinators to have any personal benefit from the purchase. But no one would fund land acquisition for stewardship. Not corporates, not philanthropists, not government or grant funders. We created stacks of supporting documents and reached out directly to potential investors in August and September of 2020, but we weren’t getting anywhere. I’m pretty sure that [EHF Co-Founder] Matthew Monahan was the only one who read all the information we sent out.”
It was then that another fortuitous meeting took place: Ness was asked to facilitate a virtual EHF workshop and crossed paths with Bioneers Founder, Joshua Fouts, who she had met as a speaker at New Frontiers the year before. “Joshua really believed in what we were doing and had the capacity to help us so he became an advisor. He helped us really personalise our approach and by November we were putting together a detailed strategy of how to crowdfund the land.”
With Joshua’s help, Ness and the team spent two months doing outreach before even launching their 6-week crowdfunding campaign in March 2021, a campaign which relied exclusively on direct network connections, with no social media promotion. Through the exceptional, ongoing support from Pīwakawaka Farm’s then-owners, Melinda Hatherley and Murray Jones, they brought people from their networks out to visit the land and see for themselves. They also partnered with The Gift Trust to accept international donations while building their own platform for donations within New Zealand. “Our minimum raise was $550,000. If we had gone to one of the established platforms to raise it, they would have taken maybe $30,000 of that.” The team also took advice from Matthew on how to structure their crowdfunding targets and, with that advice, The Learning Environment was able to far exceed their minimum raise, earning $680,000 before the campaign closed.
In the end, 70% of their total funds were raised through the support of EHF Fellows, despite the Fellowship network constituting less than 10% of the total number of donors. “There’s only so far we could have gotten without EHF Fellows,” Ness says. “Perhaps our biggest learning was that often donors fund people, rather than projects. With support and introductions from [EHF Co-Founders] Matthew, Brian and Yoseph, we were able to build those relationships and trust.”
The Learning Environment paid their deposit on the land the day the crowdfunding campaign ended and now, Ness says, the Coordinators are feeling free to really imagine what’s possible. They now get to experience the joy of just doing the work, she says, and they are looking forward to bringing more people to the land for some community events later in the year. “What’s next? I could go on for hours about what’s next! We’re working on the well-being and education models. We’re bringing in more volunteers and hosting a careers in conservation course for 20 high school students and also exploring the potential of being a predator free hub for the region. We’re offering a community-supported kai box from our market gardens over the winter. We’re exploring ecological co-design: what does this land want and need and what do we want and need.
“So much love has gone into this project since the original Coordinators started contemplating it four and a half years ago. But we all know that it’s a multigenerational project, which is exactly why we’ve been so considered in our approach... It’s amazing how much the energy has changed for us since the campaign closed. We had been working on the land already for over a year, all the while knowing that this might never happen. Everything has changed now. Everyone is that little bit lighter. Even right now, I can feel it just talking about it. Oh goodness, am I going to cry? We cry a lot,” she laughs. “Because really we’re just so grateful. We have felt amazingly nested and held within this whole process.”
The Learning Environment supports post-secondary students to learn skills to grow food, regenerate forests, self-organise, and become mentally fit and resilient. To connect with The Learning Environment, visit https://www.learningenvironment.nz/ and sign up for their regular newsletter or reach out via email, info@learningenvironment.nz.