Her Magazine is New Zealand’s only women’s business lifestyle magazine! Her Magazine highlights the achievements of successful and rising New Zealand businesswomen. Her Magazine encourages a healthy work/life balance.
Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/49418
her inform Give a little New Zealand: One of the world's most charitable nations? GO ON, TAKE A guess. How many charities do you think there are in New Zealand? Hundreds? Thousands? Try 25,570 (give or take a few). That's approximately one charity for every 172 of us. Compare that with, roughly, one charity for 218 Scots, one for 302 Americans, one for 427 Canadians and one for 446 Aussies. It's also the number of charities registered with the Charities Commission, which regulates and monitors charities, to be sure they are genuinely "charitable" (as the law sees it). Once a charity has met all the Commission's requirements, and we're happy that it really is charitable, we (and the public) can also keep an eye on it to be sure it stays that way. The Commission publishes details of registered charities on its website, which 50 | December/January 2012 | HER MAGAZINE you or any member of the public can look up. Take a look at www.charities.govt. nz, and you can see details of individual charities' purposes, who they're helping, their staff and volunteers, and what they are doing with their money. You can also find out about the charitable sector overall. For example, did you know that between them, charities receive around $14 billion a year in income? (And that they spend a large part of this on the people they are helping); and that there are around 80 charities that have annual incomes of more than $20 million? At the other end of the scale though, more than 8,000 charities have incomes of less than $20,000, and operate on the proverbial "smell of an oily rag". Charities operate right across New Zealand (in remote and small rural centres too), and some operate overseas as well. They support a vast number of causes, and help a huge range of people. They employ around 180,000 people, and the equivalent of around half a million of us have volunteered with a charity. Quite a number of charities registered with the Commission are trusts created by people's wills, set up to support good works after they are no longer around to support their favourite cause in person. In donating money and time, we New Zealanders are a generous lot, amongst the most open-handed in the world, in fact. A recent international survey, the World Giving Index, reckons that we (alongside the Aussies and the Irish) are the most charitable nations in the world. 68% of us give money, 41% of us give our time, and 63% of us have helped a stranger in need. So are there double-ups amongst our