Getting it Right with Back to the Future – The Founder’s Perspective
The Maerewhenua River flows from its source at Dansey’s Pass in the Kakanui Mountains north to the Waitaki River on its eastward journey to the Pacific Ocean.
In the late 19th Century, my great, great grandfather, Robert Simpson, formerly a tenant farmer in Scotland, purchased 184 hectares of land in the Maerewhenua Valley, and in so doing , almost certainly became the first person in his line of descent to have ever owned his own land.
A reason for establishing the Maerewhenua Trust in 1985 with a $30,000 inheritance from my grandfather’s generation was to honour the men and women in my family before me who had nurtured this land and its people and who, in order to do so, took a considerable financial risk.
These people and their stories have had a significant influence on my life.
Getting into the great outdoors with The Boys’ Brigade was the most profound experience of my youth of the 1960’s, forging lifelong perspectives, beliefs and values.
An inevitable consequence was to establish a 25 year long involvement with the organisation as a volunteer leader, the highlights of which were to take groups of boys and youth on camping, tramping, cycling and rafting trips into wilderness New Zealand.
On then to the 1970’s where I took up the challenge of establishing and leading my own group of 50 teenage boys where my main role was to facilitate, train and mentor the half a dozen tertiary aged young men who had also been boys and who chose to follow in my footsteps as volunteer leaders.
Juggling a commitment to marriage, parenthood, secondary school teaching, and Boys’ Brigade leadership in the 1980’s became problematic, and something had to give. The structured, inflexible demands of a teaching career gave way to the unstructured freedoms of property investment, and so began an interest and a livelihood that will continue to life’s end.
The Maerewhenua Trust has thus evolved as an amalgam of three significant facets of my life:
The Boys’ Brigade
The Boys’ Brigade, affirming my commitment to the Christian faith, and the belief that most young people need mentoring by responsible and mature adults.
FMC
The Federated Mountain Clubs of NZ, who share my interest in encouraging all New Zealanders to cherish, enjoy, respect, and protect their unique wilderness inheritance.
Real Estate
Real Estate, the most consistently reliable medium by which I have been able to accumulate and protect financial wealth.
The guardians of both the Boys’ Brigade and the Federated Mountain Clubs appeared to have a history of taking a conservative approach to fiscal management. Although such a policy ensured that funds would be less likely to be lost in a risk prone venture, it did not inflation proof or increase the organizations’ real wealth.
It was to meet this need that I saw a role for the Maerewhenua Trust’s financially independent fund which has used the higher risk investment strategy of leveraged commercial real estate.
The original $30,000 has become a fund with a nett worth of $4m, currently producing a nett income of $300,000 pa, of which 25% is given to BBNZ, 25% to FMC, and 50% retained for new investment.
It has always been my hope that this money could be used to support the wider work of both organizations and, in particular, that of the volunteer adult mentors who encourage young people into the great outdoors so that they in turn will become passionate advocates for it.
