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RNZFB 2020: Sustaining our Future

In March 2008, the Foundation launched RNZFB 2020: Sustaining our Future, a bold and far-reaching consultation project to consider, alongside all our stakeholders, what the Foundation and its services might look like in 2020.

At the time, financial analysis to the year 2020 showed that we could not continue to deliver services in the way we do today. In fact, by 2020 the Foundation would face an annual operating deficit of $10 million. We knew we needed to change the way we were doing things.

Three 2020 workshops involving our members, Board member, volunteers, staff, consumer organisations and donors were held to discuss the core issues and look at the way forward. From those workshops a consultation document was drawn up and distributed broadly across our stakeholder base, enabling even more people to have their say. Feedback from the consultation was considered and analysed by the Board and was used to inform the Strategic Plan 2009-2015.

Towards the latter stages of the 2020 project, around the time we were going out for consultation, the economic downturn first struck. The downturn means that the size of our deficits will increase over a much shorter period of time. This gave a new context and importance to the 2020 project.

Our work on the 2020 project does means that we are in many ways ahead of the game. We anticipated financial difficulties in 2007 and knew that we would have to change. RNZFB 2020 was our response. A year ago we started thinking about the issues that some other organisations started to address much later. This gives us a clear direction on how to move forward, confident that we are taking our stakeholders with us.