Improving outcomes for the next generation of New Zealanders
If you want New Zealand children to enjoy better health, education and wellbeing, you can make a lasting difference with the Aotearoa Lifecourse Fund.
Lifecourse skills are the key ingredients in childhood that lay the foundations for happy, healthy, successful lives as adults. Building lifecourse skills in childhood can also be a circuit-breaker for intergenerational disadvantage.
Aotearoa Lifecourse Fund is building lifecourse skills through a globally-proven model of venture philanthropy.
Our goal is to improve the long-term outcomes of as many children and young people as possible in New Zealand.
In the next five years, the Fund will put NZ $10M into finding, funding and scaling 5-6 programmes that build lifecourse skills for tamariki and rangatahi.
See this case study of a programme that’s already building the self-regulation skills of 50,000 preschoolers every day across Aotearoa:
Video: Highlights of the ENGAGE scaling story - from Centre for Strategic Philanthropy breakfast event (2024)
The Aotearoa Lifecourse Fund is a link between donors and doers committed to making a lasting difference for our children and young people.
Aotearoa Lifecourse Fund is co-founded by Izzy Horrocks and Jimmy McLauchlan, and supported by the Centre for Strategic Philanthropy.
Collectively, the team has a track record of, finding high potential programmes, funding those programmes through high-trust, long-term partnerships and scaling programmes that work to improve the lives of children and young people.
“This is an outstanding example of strategic philanthropy in action. It is powered by two leaders in their field, evidence-based, and incorporating expertise with grants. CSP is proud to support Izzy and Jimmy in the development and delivery of the Aotearoa Lifecourse Fund”
Aotearoa faces big social challenges for our children and young people:
Education: School attendance is poor with just over half of New Zealand children attending regularly. School students have some of the highest rates of problem behaviours, and these behaviours have worsened in the last two years. We lead the OECD in educational inequity.
Mental health: New Zealand’s youth suicide rate is the second worst in the developed world at 14.9 deaths per 100,000 adolescents. This rate is more than twice the average among the 41 OECD countries surveyed.
Physical health: New Zealand has the second highest obesity rate in the OECD. More than 1 in 3 children are obese or overweight.
Youth crime: After more than a decade of declining youth crime, offending has increased post COVID.
But, there is strong evidence on the ingredients in childhood that create happy, healthy, successful lives as adults.
A well-known New Zealand example comes from the Dunedin Longitudinal Study, who found that self-regulation skills in childhood accurately predicted adult outcomes in physical health, income, employment, education, criminal offending, relationships and life satisfaction. Dunedin Study children in the top quintile of self-regulation skills were:
4 x less likely to have a criminal conviction than those in the bottom quintile for self-regulation;
3 x less likely to attempt suicide than those in the bottom quintile for self-regulation; and
4 x less time on benefits by age 38 than those in the bottom quintile for self-regulation.
If lifecourse skills (like self-regulation) can be supported at large scale, over multiple years, we can expect to see improvements in social, educational and wellbeing outcomes across a generation of children in Aotearoa.