"It does feel a bit odd, really."
Otago Community Trust chief executive Barbara Bridger is reflecting on her last few days in the position she has held for the past nine years.
Earlier this year, it was announced Ms Bridger had been appointed chief executive of the Cromwell-headquartered Central Lakes Trust.
In many ways, the new role was very similar to her old one; working in a community philanthropic organisation supporting community groups.
This time, she got to live in Central Otago, a place where she had holidayed for many years and where two of her three adult children now live.
Ms Bridger and her husband Ken Lister, Forsyth Barr Dunedin manager and senior investment adviser, had been thinking of moving to the area in the next few years.
The CLT position presented itself a little earlier than planned but it "ticked all the boxes" and the timing felt right, she said.
When the position was previously advertised in 2017, Ms Bridger seriously considered applying but she had not been at OCT very long and she felt it would be disrespectful to the trust to leave.
Ms Bridger would live in Arrowtown, where the couple already spent a lot of their time, and commute to Cromwell for work while Mr Lister would continue at Forsyth Barr. They were not selling their Dunedin home.
Originally from Dunedin, Ms Bridger studied accounting at the University of Otago where she met her future husband in business law lectures.
After a brief stint at what is now Polson Higgs, she joined the Audit Office. When the couple moved to Wellington in 1987, she started a role with Ernst Young and worked there for three years before transferring to London in the banking, financial services and audit sector. She later worked for Credit Suisse First Boston in credit management.
Returning to Dunedin in the mid-1990s to start a family, the couple were initially unsure how long they would stay in the city.
Several years later, a practice manager role arose at Mornington Health Centre; it was a new position and Ms Bridger did not know anything about the health system.
It was decided she would work three mornings a week for six months to see how it worked out. She ended up being there for 17 years.
The centre — one of New Zealand’s largest medical practices — established the country’s first stand-alone Primary Health Organisation (PHO). That was an exciting time, enabling it to access funds to do innovative things in health, she said.
It was also a challenging role; big renovations were done doing her tenure and there was also a constant need to recruit medical, nursing and administration staff. The part-time role morphed into a full-time position.
In February, 2014, Ms Bridger joined the Otago Community Trust which was looking for a chief executive with investment and management skills.
Ticking those boxes, she figured she also knew about community through her involvement with health but she discovered she did not know as much about community as she thought she did, she recalled.
She did not realise just how much happened in the community through goodwill and voluntary effort. It would look "completely different" if that was not going on in the background, she said.
The trust’s catchment was vast; from the Waitaki Valley to the Catlins and Upper Clutha. Each year, it gave about 450 grants with a budget of about $10 million in the last few years. That figure was dependent on investment returns — "things are a bit challenging at the moment,", she said.
Giving away money was a lovely job — "I do feel in a very privileged position to be able to support community groups and give away much-needed funding" — but it was not easy.
"You’re always disappointing people because we just cannot meet the demand for funding. There’s a limit to what we can do," she said.
When considering funding applications, the trust often asked itself if it was the role of philanthropy, or the role of government.
People often looked at the trust’s balance sheet but the reality was it was a fund in perpetuity and there needed to be "a careful hand on the tiller" to make sure it did not disappear.
The trust was a contributory funder and those applying for grants needed to raise money themselves. That indicated that it was something the community wanted.
Another challenge was the "churn" of trustees; there had been about 80 trustees since the trust’s formation in 1988.
During her time, there had been 25 trustees and five chairpersons, so it was not a role that was static or never-changing.
She had to induct 16 new trustees; historically, trustees had a four-year appointment and some were entitled to a second term.
Everyone came to the trustee positions with good intentions and was there for the right reason "but it does take a while to get people up to speed with how things are done", she said.
Sometimes the trust lobbied the Department of Internal Affairs — which appointed the trustees — for a specific skillset and it could also be challenging to find those people.
One of the largest grants during her tenure was partnering with Government and the Central Lakes Trust to contribute $27 million from the three entities to join up the cycle trails in Central Otago, a project which was still going on. That was "just an amazing asset" for the region, she said.
And then there were the handwritten letters the trust received from school pupils, whether it provided florescent vests for a walking school bus or Chromebooks for a classroom, there were "just so many lovely stories", she said.
Taking on the role, Ms Bridger was challenged to raise the profile of the trust. It now supported various events in the city which had done that, including naming rights sponsor for the New Zealand Masters Games, and the Tūhura Otago Community Trust Science Centre at Tūhura Otago Museum.
Moving to CLT, there would be some similarities but there would also be differences, the major one being that CLT was the owner of Pioneer Energy.
Whereas the OCT was established from the banking reform in the late 1980s, CLT came out of energy reforms.
There were 12 community trusts throughout New Zealand which all worked quite closely together but there were not energy trusts throughout the country, she said.
She was looking forward to getting to know a new board — it was smaller than OCT with eight instead of 11 — and seeing how it operated. She enjoyed new challenges, she said.
On reflection, Dunedin had been a great place to live and bring up a family and she and her husband could not have chosen a better place to do that.
The other advantage was the proximity to Central Otago where she would continue to indulge her love of skiing and "desperately" try to improve her golf — "it’s an effort".
Ms Bridger would miss the OCT team but she would keep in touch with them. Both CLT and OCT regularly made grants to the same organisations and, up until Covid-19, used to regularly catch-up.
Once installed in her new job next month, she is keen to resurrect that, as both shared similar issues and personal development requirements.
