40 Years of Impact: Insights from CID's Former Directors

Josie Pagani

When I came to work at CID in 2016, I was very conscious of the 30 year legacy we were tasked with continuing, of the titans of the sector who had come before, like Rae Julian, Pat Webster and many others. I was also aware that CID had almost closed its doors, and its future looked shaky. Some of our bigger members had already left, and others were threatening to leave. If we could not demonstrate that CID had the trust and support of the sector, MFAT would have withdrawn their funding.

Throughout the life of CID there has always been that tension, between an organisation representing its members and an organisation funded in part by government. New Zealand is just not big enough to fund an organisation like CID through 100% membership fees. That means our relationship with government and MFAT remains vital. 

It hasn’t always been easy to balance this. CID is not the ‘union’ of the sector. Neither is it a subsidiary of MFAT. With the support of the Board, key members, and MFAT leadership, we came up with a strategy that prioritised training and up-skilling for staff in the sector, linking members to research and online training, plus fixing the relationship with government and ministers after being largely ignored for years. We brought former members back into the fold, and expanded our associate membership to New Zealand businesses working in the Pacific, and Pacifika organisations working here and in the region. We focused on expanding the annual conference with workshops and guest speakers, bedding in the CID Code, and providing an excellent coordination role so vital in humanitarian crises. 

Together with a small team of dedicated, professional staff and interns, we managed to get CID into a stronger position than when we all started. 

Funding pressures mean that CID feels vulnerable still, and always has to make its case. It can feel like ground hog day. But if it can keep proving the importance of New Zealand’s development and humanitarian aid in an increasingly volatile and unpredictable work, and bring the public with us, members and governments of all colours will continue to see the unique value of this peak body organisation.

Wren Green

“Oh, but isn’t CID dead?!”  A question I was asked a few times back in mid-2010.  I was the new CID Director facing an 80% cut in CID’s grant from MFAT (then about 95% of CID’s budget). Challenging times!  Of the staff, only Pedram Pirnia remained. Gone were the excellent training staff, office, communications and finance personnel.  I was on a 3-day week. No, not dead, but not well either.

It was a wake-up call, thanks to Foreign Affairs Minister, Murray McCully, and CID quickly woke up. The Board moved swiftly to raise member’s fees on a sliding scale and I vowed to spend funds like water – very slowly, one drip at a time. I also made it clear that this was a ‘new CID’, one that would do more with members as well as for members. To compensate the training budget cut, CID members ran training courses for CID. We developed an informative fortnightly e-newsletter that updated members, with links, on the latest global advances in development theory and practice.

We asked members to send us photos from partners’ projects. The response was enthusiastic.  And so we started the annual photo competition and built up a photo library. We used them to produce an attractive annual calendar, posted it to all MPs and sold them through Trade Aid shops. It was a win-win that improved CID’s profile, engaged and acknowledged members achievements, and replaced starving babies photos with positive images of development instead.

A major initiative that took a few years to research, develop, consult, and ‘sell’ to members was the development and implementation of the CID Code of Conduct.  Collectively, the sector spends millions annually from public and private sources, so more rigorous and transparent accountability, both financial and of practice, was overdue. We modelled ours on the Code used by ACFID, our Australian counterpart, but made changes to suit our context. An independent committee of development experts now decides if members are ‘Code compliant’ once they complete the Code self-assessment and have made changes, if necessary. Hard work, of course, but an important CID achievement for the sector’s reputation, protection and performance.

CID is in a slightly awkward position. It receives government money, but should be willing to criticize perceived government shortcomings and should push hard for a larger aid spend. If CID doesn’t do this on behalf of the collective membership, who will? So that task ‘engaged’ me from time to time on various issues. We were also proactive and produced two membership-funded “Briefs to the Incoming Government” prior to two general elections (2011, 2014). These were glossy, multi-page publications detailing, constructively, where the priority needs were for aid expenditure and the challenges. All political parties need this expert ‘advice’ before elections.

The vital work on humanitarian response skills was another area we boosted considerably and is a unique contribution members play helping partners preparing for and assisting after disasters. All these achievements were only possible with dedicated work by the superb, highly skilled and experienced staff members I employed and worked with and with the support of various CID boards. Long live CID!

The Golden Years of CID - Rae Julian

I was CEO of CID from 2001-2008. Those were the golden years for CID. I inherited an organisation with enthusiastic staff and an excellent relationship with the NZAID division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT), ably led by Peter Adams. Together we built CID up to a membership of 93 organisations: a combination of large groups such as Oxfam, World Vision, UNICEF and Save the Children Fund, and small ethnic groups from Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Cambodia, as well as Pasifika and Māori organisations.

NZAID were our partners in every sense. We had a memorandum of understanding that promised full consultation on development issues. Their staff comprised development experts, people we respected. Some were former staff of our member NGOs. This relationship was similar at the ministerial level, as over the years we had regular meetings with our Minister. Matt Robson met us monthly but Marian Hobbs, Phil Goff and then Winston Peters could not maintain such a frequent timetable. Both Phil and Winston always included NGO representatives on their annual tours to the Pacific.

Although we had a cordial relationship with the Government, we still considered that more could be done to promote international development. We made submissions to the Budget preparation, reminded them that trade deals should take human rights and similar issues into account and that the debt burdens of developing countries should be absolved. Point Seven was one of our major campaigns, to persuade the Government to increase the budget for international development to 0.7% of GDP. We succeeded in getting a small increase but the target remained distant.

A team from the membership administered a project fund, called KOHA, for which all members were eligible. KOHA was carefully supervised and monitored by external agents; in the years of its existence there was no evidence of mismanagement or corruption. Some KOHA grants were relatively small, within the capacity of some diaspora members wanting to help those in their home countries, for example. CID had a training programme to assist those new to the principles and processes of international to be able to access the funding.

Sadly, in 2008 following my retirement and after a change of government, NZAID was reabsorbed into MFAT.  KOHA was taken back into the ministry and changed into a larger scheme with greatly increased grants that were beyond the capacity of our smaller members. Funding for CID was cut back drastically. The international development world became no longer inclusive.

Patricia Webster

In 1994 CID was a small organisation with a part-time Coordinator (Don Clarke). When I became Executive Director we had just moved into an office in Molesworth Street, 2 floors below VSA. There were five organisations on the floor, a nascent internet organisation, an Environmental NGO, The Development Resource Centre and the Africa Information Centre as well as CID and CID managed the lease. I remember thinking that based on the money that was coming in I might be back to part-time by the end of the following year but fortunately the Minister’s Advisory Committee on External Aid and Development (ACEAD) had just conducted a review and recommended that CID receive more funding to facilitate the relationship between CID and MFAT. Also in 1995, CID managed the Commonwealth NGO forum in Wellington on behalf of the Association of NGOs of Aotearoa (ANGOA), in the run up to the CHOGM that year in Auckland. This provided us with a small buffer for our work plans in the following years and enabled us to start a process of growth and establishment.

I discovered that in taking on the job with CID I had also become the Secretary of ANGOA as CID hosted the organisation in its early years. This was like running two separate organisations at once and both were really busy. In the end I spent a few years arranging for ANGOA’s independence but during those years ANGOA was heavily involved with the outcomes of the Earth Summit held in Rio De Janeiro in 1994, particularly Agenda 21 which encouraged the inclusion of civil society in the formation of in-country environment and development policy. Thus, we took an active part in alternative reports for follow-up summits on issues such as Women and  Social Development. During the 1990s CID participated in several NGO/Government relationship conferences run by the Commonwealth Foundation in NZ and the Pacific Islands and we eventually developed the first ever partnership document agreed between an NGO and a Government Department in New Zealand. This document recognised the independent role of CID as a representative of its member organisations and its role both as a facilitator of the relationship between it and DEV but also its role as external critic.

CID admitted Save the Children shortly after I arrived, ensuring that most major agencies and many smaller ones were members. During my seven years as ED we grew as an organisation as we developed a training and development programme with our members, set up an internet communications system (when I started none of the organisations were on email and we had to communicate by sending out monthly packets of information. We started by sending emails to nominated individuals at their home and eventually the organisations came to realise the value of direct electronic links). Our newsletter became more professional and collegial. We hosted the National Disaster Relief Forum (NDRF) for coordinating some agency work in the event of emergencies particularly in the Pacific and we had some notable ones during those years, such as the Tsunami in Papua New Guinea and the independence struggle in East Timor.