Community trusts, university foundations, and charitable endowments share a defining characteristic: the capital is meant to last.
- The portfolio exists to fund grants, scholarships, research, and community outcomes not just for this board's term, but for every board that follows. That perpetuity mandate shapes everything about how the investment function should be governed.
We work with trust and foundation boards across New Zealand, and this is where our institutional experience runs deepest. The governance challenges are specific: portfolios that have grown more complex than the oversight structures originally designed for them, boards that regularly welcome new members into an unfamiliar investment governance role, and a set of interconnected decisions (risk appetite, asset allocation, reserves, and spending sustainability) that most advisers never bring to the surface as a coherent system.
These are solvable challenges. They require an investment partner who understands the governance realities of perpetual capital, not just the portfolio construction, and who can bring the institutional infrastructure, reporting, and education that allows trustees to govern with confidence.
Connecting the Portfolio to the Purpose
The question that sits behind most trust and foundation board discussions is whether the investment portfolio can sustain the institution's granting commitments while preserving capital for future generations. Confidence in the answer comes from understanding the relationship between investment risk, portfolio returns, and the trust's spending requirements.
We structure our reporting to make that relationship visible. Every aspect of the portfolio is linked back to the trust's core purpose: how current asset allocation supports the spending policy, how risk is being managed relative to the trust's capacity to absorb short-term losses without compromising long-term capital preservation, and how actual returns compare to the level needed to sustain granting at the current rate.
This includes peer comparison reporting with context. Trusts sometimes measure themselves against KiwiSaver funds or other investment vehicles that have fundamentally different objectives, time horizons, and risk profiles. We provide comparison points that are genuinely relevant, so the board can assess performance against institutions with similar mandates, not against benchmarks that invite misleading conclusions.
When the board can see clearly how every part of the portfolio connects to the trust's ability to grant, the investment discussion changes. It moves from a technical exercise to a governance conversation grounded in purpose.
Equipping New Trustees
Trust and foundation boards experience regular turnover, particularly community trusts where trustees are elected or appointed for fixed terms. New trustees bring fresh perspectives and community insight, but they also arrive into an investment governance role that can feel unfamiliar if the induction process is light.
- We take trustee induction seriously. We prefer to meet new trustees in person and spend a couple of hours providing a thorough grounding in the trust's investment context: the investment history, the key decisions that have been made and the rationale behind them, and a practical introduction to how we measure and monitor investment risks to ensure the inflation-adjusted value of the trust's assets is maintained for future generations.
The aim is not to turn trustees into investment specialists. It is to ensure that every trustee sitting around the table has enough context to engage meaningfully in investment committee discussions, ask useful questions, and contribute to governance decisions with confidence. We adapt the induction to the individual. Some new trustees arrive with significant investment experience and want a focused briefing on this trust's specific portfolio and governance arrangements. Others are encountering institutional investment governance for the first time and benefit from a broader foundation. The format adjusts, but the objective is the same: every trustee should feel equipped to contribute from their first meeting.
Continuing to Build Investment Knowledge
Trustee induction addresses the immediate need. But institutional investment governance evolves, and the trustees who are most effective are those who continue to deepen their understanding over time.
We provide ongoing education outside the board meeting agenda, so that learning does not compete with governance. This takes three forms.
The common thread across all three is that the education is designed for the people who actually govern trust and foundation portfolios, not repurposed from content written for investment professionals. The language, the level of assumed knowledge, and the practical focus all reflect the reality that these boards include people with a wide range of investment experience.
Workshops
Workshops allow trustees to explore specific topics in more depth than a board meeting permits. These might focus on a forthcoming strategic asset allocation review, an emerging asset class the trust is considering, or a governance challenge that warrants dedicated discussion. We schedule these in the lead-up to significant decisions, so the board arrives at those decisions better prepared.
Research Publications
Research publications give trustees access to our thinking on the issues that matter to institutional investors in New Zealand, from how to evaluate manager performance to the governance implications of adding alternative asset classes. These are written to be genuinely useful to non-specialist readers: practical frameworks, clear analysis, and specific takeaways that trustees can apply to their own governance context.
Webinars
Webinars provide a flexible format for trustees to stay current with developments in investment markets, regulatory changes, and governance best practice without requiring travel or a significant time commitment.
How Risk, Investment, and Spending Sustainability Connect
This is the governance relationship that we find most trust and foundation boards have not had clearly explained to them, and the one that makes the biggest difference when they see it.
Most boards treat their investment decisions and their spending decisions as separate exercises. The investment committee sets the strategic asset allocation. The grants committee sets the annual grants budget. The board approves both. But these are not independent decisions. They are a system, and changing one changes the others.
Risk Appetite
The trust's tolerance for short-term volatility. Determines how much the portfolio can lose in a downturn without compromising the trust's ability to sustain its spending commitments.
Investment Objective
The target return that needs to cover the spending rate, inflation, and fees while staying within the board's tolerance for short-term loss.
Strategic Asset Allocation
The mechanism that delivers the target return. A conservative risk appetite with an ambitious return target creates an impossible brief.
Reserving Policy
The buffer that determines how much volatility the trust can actually absorb before spending is affected. Deeper reserves allow more short-term portfolio volatility.
Sustainable Spending Level
The Output
The output of the entire system, not an independent input. Determined by the interaction of all four elements above.
The point is not that any of this is especially complex once it has been explained. It is that most advisers never bring it to the surface. The investment adviser reports on portfolio returns. The board approves a grants budget. Nobody explains the connection between the two. And so trustees can spend years governing a trust without ever seeing how these decisions interact, or understanding that a change to one has consequences for all the others.
A board that does understand this system as a whole is a board that can govern with genuine confidence. It can explain to its community why it is holding reserves rather than distributing them. It can commit to multi-year granting programmes because it understands what the reserves can absorb. It can approve one-off strategic project grants with a clear framework for assessing the long-term impact on the portfolio, rather than debating each request as an exception. These are the governance capabilities that an annual budgeting approach, disconnected from the investment analysis, cannot provide.
We run workshops specifically designed to walk boards through the investment governance system that underpins these spending decisions. Trustees consistently tell us that seeing these connections for the first time was the moment their investment governance clicked into place.
For boards that want to see how these five elements interact in practice, our companion guide on spending policy and reserves includes an interactive governance tool that lets you adjust risk appetite and spending level and watch how the 15-year capital projection responds. It is the clearest way to see why these decisions cannot be made independently.
Reporting to Your Community
The responsibility of managing significant assets on behalf of future generations does not sit only in boardroom discussions and manager reports. For many trusts and foundations, it extends to giving the community or beneficiaries confidence that the assets are being governed as well as they can be.
This means presenting at annual general meetings, publishing annual reports, and responding to questions about investment strategy and returns. This public-facing accountability is a governance function in its own right, and it requires investment reporting designed for two different audiences.
The investment committee needs analytical depth: attribution analysis, risk metrics, manager assessment, and forward-looking positioning. The community or beneficiary audience needs clarity, context, and confidence. They need to understand that the trust's capital is being managed with discipline and that the board is governing the portfolio in their long-term interest. The quarterly report to the investment committee and the investment content for the annual presentation at the AGM are different documents serving different governance purposes. Both need to be done well, and both should be designed with their audience in mind from the outset.
How We Work with Trusts and Foundations
The level of support we provide is shaped by each trust's governance needs, the complexity of its portfolio, and how the board wants to spend its time.
Advice Only
We provide independent advice on spending policy, asset allocation, manager evaluation, and governance frameworks. Your board or investment committee makes all decisions and manages implementation. This works well for trusts with strong internal investment capability or a well-established investment committee that wants specialist input alongside its own analysis.
Partial Delegation
Your board sets strategic direction, spending policy, and investment objectives. We handle the elements the board chooses to delegate, which may include manager selection and monitoring, portfolio rebalancing, transition management, or spending policy modelling. The scope of delegation is tailored to your governance capacity and preferences.
Full Delegation
We work with your board to establish risk appetite, return objectives, and spending policy aligned with the trust's perpetuity mandate. We are accountable for the investment function within those parameters: portfolio construction, manager oversight, implementation, and reporting that shows whether the portfolio is on track to sustain the trust's spending policy. Your board maintains governance oversight, authority over granting decisions, and the authority to adjust the framework at any time.
We also run governance workshops for boards and investment committees, focused on the investment governance system that connects risk appetite, asset allocation, and spending policy sustainability. These sessions are available to boards at any level of engagement, including those who are not yet working with us.
Our companion pages on the spectrum of support and our approach explore the three models in detail.
