Many of you will know of the financial crisis we face since our primary funder, the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind, significantly reduced the funding it allocates to consumer organisations like ours. I won’t repeat the details here, except to say that we have been working hard to develop other sources of income. One major challenge has been to explain to other funders how we are different from the Foundation and why they should support our organisation when they might already be supporting the Foundation.

Many of you will know of the financial crisis we face since our primary funder, the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind, significantly reduced the funding it allocates to consumer organisations like ours. I won’t repeat the details here, except to say that we have been working hard to develop other sources of income. One major challenge has been to explain to other funders how we are different from the Foundation and why they should support our organisation when they might already be supporting the Foundation. You may already know that in order to at least try to live within our reduced income, we had to cancel our usual three-day annual conference this year and hold just a one-day AGM.

Now we can advise that an application to the Lotteries Commission was successful and this means we will be able to hold our usual three-day conference in October 2014, along with a leadership development activity and advocacy workshop. Of course we cannot depend on such applications always being successful, so we don’t know what the situation will be for 2015 and beyond.

We will continue to focus next year on funding applications to trusts and philanthropic organisations to supplement the income we do receive from the Foundation. We must be thankful for the success we have achieved, but we remain disillusioned that the Foundation knowingly and deliberately under-funds consumer organisations while it continues to enjoy strong financial support from the public who give to support blindness activities in general. In the end, if we must go out and fundraise, it just means we will compete against the Foundation and possibly other blindness consumer organisations for the same funding. Public confusion mayresult and blind people may well be worse off. But we have little choice.

We continue to be humbled by the support of our branches. We again express our appreciation to South Canterbury Branch for their donation of $2,000 towards toll-costs of our National Feedback Line that runs on the Telephone Information Service.

The theme of next year’s conference is “Rights, Responsibilities, Results”. We will be focusing on presentations that help define what we mean by rights which flow from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, what responsibilities do we have as we assert these rights, and what will this mean for us in our everyday lives.

The Board is also planning that our usual leadership seminar and advocacy workshop will be held in conjunction with next year’s Conference. However unlike previous leadership seminars, next year’s one will focus specifically on encouraging our members to take an interest in being on our Board or join a branch committee. Three Board Members (Martine Abel-Williamson, Amanda Stevens and Paula Waby) have been appointed to develop more detail on how to do this for the Board’s consideration in March 2014.