For anyone starting out with an idea, Ākina worked with Business.govt.nz to develop a series of tools for impact businesses to get started and grow. You can find these in the 'Doing Business for Good' section of the business.govt.nz website.

Ākina hopes you find them useful!

Starting or growing a purpose-led business takes money. If you need more than you have, you could consider getting an investment. Investment is someone giving money to a business in return for profit.

Find out how to decide on investment here

Ākina exists to transform New Zealand's economy through the power of impact! One way we're doing this is by helping to grow a stronger and more streamlined impact investing market in New Zealand; one where more funding is available for social and environmental initiatives.

Once a year, Ākina runs the Impact Investment Readiness Programme (IIRP). Ākina wants this programme to encourage more investment in impact-driven businesses, to increase the overall impact made by social enterprises and other purpose-led businesses in New Zealand.

Successful Ākina IIRP recipients can go on to receive:

• Up to $25,000 to spend on professional services to help your impact-driven organisation get ready for investment.

• Examples of ways funding has been used in the past include paying for the costs of preparing an impact model, for an Information Memorandum, producing financial projections and assistance with developing or refining business models.

• This funding cannot be used for general business expenses, development, or validation – it is specifically for services that enable you to get ready for a significantly larger amount of investment. Past recipients generally receive over 20 times the amount of this funding in investment from investors.

Learn more about the IIRP here.

Check out the guide we created on the Impact Initiative.

This is a guide all about impact-led business and social enterprise. Social enterprise is one way of delivering impact through business that you can have in your toolkit of delivering impact.

Use the guide to think about if social enterprise is the right approach for your business idea, and understand where social enterprise fits in the context of New Zealand’s economy.

Set out on the right foot and get ready to make sustainable impact!

Use this tool to understand:

• What might be needed to start your social enterprise.

• Your obligations for starting up a business.

• How to start thinking about impact and how it fits in.

• Who can help, and where they are.

Download the checklist here

Start thinking about how to design your business model to deliver positive impact!

Use this tool to:

• Understand different business models that are commonly used in social enterprise.

• Understand when each one would be most effective to deliver positive impact.

Download the guide here

Learn how businesses have shifted ot a Social Enterprise model here.

There is no specific legal structure for social enterprise in New Zealand. However, there are ways of getting around this.

The most common options for registering are:

• Limited Liability Company
• Limited Liability Company with Charitable Trust
• Charitable Trust

Before getting into deciding a legal structure, make sure you are at a stage where it makes sense to register, for example, you have proven your product or service is something people want, and that your intended impact will be positive.

Then, take a look at the pros and cons of different legal structures. The options will be different depending on things like how you intend to operate, governance, how you might raise funding, and long term plans for your social enterprise.

For more general information, check out this free tool from Ākina: A guide to legal structures for impact-led organisations

The Social Lean Canvas was created in 2014 by Rowan Yeoman, Dave Moskovitz and the Ākina Foundation. It is adapted from Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas which is in turn adapted from Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Who should be using the canvas?

This Canvas is a great tool for you if you are a social enterprise, an impact-led business or a charity developing a revenue generating arm. We will be using the term ‘business’ to refer to all of these scenarios in our instructions.

Download the Canvas and find more information here

Check out the Legal opinion on use of funds for Impact Investing that Ākina was addressed in. This was created by ParryField Lawyers.

In the past, Trustees thought about how the income that came from the capital they invested could be used to do good. The new Trusts Act 2019 (the Act) lets us reframe this – it references the purpose of the Trust itself and the need to bear that in mind when investing. This means that Trustees should also look at where they invest capital and how it advances the purpose and has impact, as well as what to do with the income.

Read more here