The Wellington Children’s Foundation has found a new home with Nikau Foundation, ensuring its century-long legacy of community support will continue for generations to come.

The newly established Wellington Children’s Foundation Fund will distribute grants for the first time during Nikau’s grants round. Applications for this round will close on Tuesday the 18th of March.

About the Wellington Children’s Foundation:

In 1985, a ‘for sale’ sign was pitched outside Citizen’s Day Nursery on Wellington’s Vivian Street. Although the sale of the building signalled the end of an era for social services in our city, it also prompted the start of a new, important chapter – the Wellington Children’s Foundation.

Established in 1921, Citizen’s Day Nursery was the brainchild of Mayoress Lady Jacobina Luke. At a time where very little state assistance was provided to widowed, unmarried or working women, the nursery offered a “friendly hand and proffered practical help to working wives”.

A new chapter of generosity

As society progressed, more women entered the workforce and the tarnish of being an unmarried mother dulled, the nursery slowly shed its association with poverty and charity. By the 1980s, childcare was a widely available public service, rendering the nursery’s charitable services less viable.

This social environment paired with the deterioration of the Vivian Street building, which, now over 100 years old, no longer met Social Welfare’s licensing requirements, provided an opportunity to reimagine the future of the nursery and think of new ways of maintaining its charitable intent while delivering support in a more relevant, contemporary way.

“In the end, on the best advice possible, we put the property up for sale, and from the proceeds, once we had met ongoing commitments, we set up [the Wellington Children’s] Foundation with the aim of continuing to help, albeit in different form, needy children,” records state.

With a goal to support the interests and welfare of children and their families as the nursery had for over 60 years, this new chapter was characterised by fresh agility and an ability to move with the times and provide support in a more robust, flexible way.

Since 1986, the Wellington Children’s Foundation has supported a wide range of organisations – from grants provided to Birthright Aotearoa to nurture families in Hutt Valley, to Ted’s Space to deliver animal therapy to students and the Nest Collective to provide baby essentials to families in need.

“The Wellington Children’s Foundation has had the pleasure of working alongside so many organisations over almost 40 years,” says former Chair Judith Pope. “It’s been heartening to take up the baton of early innovators like Lady Luke and offer support in a way that is responsive to the world we now live in.”

About the Wellington Children’s Foundation Fund

In early 2024, after many years of volunteer service, the Wellington Children’s Foundation trustees were becoming ready to hang up their hats. Succession planning became an important agenda item, with all trustees hoping to find the next guardian of Lady Luke’s legacy.

“We wanted to avoid winding down the Foundation,” says Judith. “Like we had in 1985, we wanted to think of a new way to carry on our story.”

The Wellington Children’s Foundation Fund was established with Nikau Foundation in 2024. As the Wellington Children’s Foundation has done and as the Citizen’s Day Nursery has done before, the fund will continue to support the welfare and interests of children and their families for generations to come.

“We are so delighted to be the guardian of this next chapter of support for our region’s tamariki and their whānau,” says Nikau Foundation Executive Director, Emma Lewis. “To be able to carry on the work of an organisation with such a long and impressive history of community care is an honour.”

About Nikau Foundation’s Grants Round:

• Applications open on Tuesday 11th of February and close on Tuesday 18th of March. • To apply for a grant, for more information or to see Nikau Foundation’s funding eligibility criteria, please see www.nikaufoundation.nz/2025.

About Nikau Foundation:

Nikau Foundation is Te Upoko-o-te-Ika-a-Māui, the Greater Wellington region’s community foundation. With a mission to grow generosity to support the people and places of our region, every gift is responsibly invested and grown to build reliable, long-term funding streams.

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