Sun 21 Jun 2015 In: Our Communities View at Wayback View at NDHA
Disregarding its predecessors such as Hero and pride events throughout New Zealand and overseas, the Auckland Pride Festival's unique DNA can be tracked back to three well-attended community meetings in mid-2012. During those meetings people from the city's glbti communities expressed a strong desire for the return of an annual celebration of being anything but straight. The meetings were put together by Gresham Bradley and others on behalf of the GABA Charitable Trust after Auckland Central MP Nikki Kaye, in a pre-election rush of enthusiasm, suggested that it was time that the Auckland City Council make such a festival one of the showpiece community events it financially supports and in some case facilitates. An enthusiastic group of glbti people attended the community consultation meetings, representing a wide range of ages, sexualities, ethnicities and gender identities. MPs Kaye, Jacinda Ardern and Louisa Wall and the city's Deputy Mayor Penny Hulse also joined in, and all became firm supporters of the project. A temporary steering group was subsequently formed in mid-July to take the emerging concept to Council and to steer an Auckland Pride Festival organisation into place. The group were Bradley (who had chaired the public meetings), Lindsey Rea (who had minuted the meetings), Simon Randall, Antony Ovens, Vaughan Meneses, Sam Shore, Anne Speir, Tony Walker, Wayne Lockwood and Nick Lange, all with proven experience and commitment to glbti initiatives. Using Rea's notes and observations as a guideline the steering group, which included people with unassailable accounting, legal, community organisation and political credentials and expertise, decided to create a charitable trust. “The initial trust deed was drawn up to try to reflect the sort of community involvement that had been expressed as being important at the meetings,” says Rea, a long-time community stalwart with local body politics experience. “They talked about responsiveness from and to the communities and the need to assist and grow the communities, to do liaison work with the council, and to assist the communities to get what they needed and wanted out of it.” The sense of involvement with and from the wider glbti community was a very strong theme right from the start, Rea says. Even at the public consultation meetings “where there were gaps we had tried to encourage representation, for people to come along.” A trust deed was drawn up. The following four paragraphs are dense, detailed but important stuff, so stiffen yourself and hang in there a little longer if you will. Alternatively, skim-read them for now - though you will likely want to come back to them later. TRUST OBJECTIVES According to a final draft version of its registration document made available to GayNZ.com Daily News the Auckland Pride Festival Trust's objectives were to undertake or assist others to “facilitate and promote the delivery of a festival at Auckland for the Rainbow Community and wider Auckland; provide opportunities for the Rainbow Community to create and participate in cultural events and activities under the umbrella of an Auckland Pride Festival; foster an environment through an Auckland Pride Festival for all members of the Rainbow Community to celebrate its sexual orientation and gender identity; form partnerships with other organisations that share the values, aims and objectives of the Trust; to embrace the principals of Te Tiriti O Waitangi, the Treaty of Waitangi; to develop the mana and standing of the Rainbow Community and enhance the cultural richness of Auckland at large; and to do all other things that will further the objects of the Trust within New Zealand.” TRUST PRINCIPLES In the somewhat stilted wording of formal registration documents the forthcoming Auckland Pride Festival Trust was also committed to respecting “the diversity of the Rainbow Community of New Zealand/Aotearoa; respect the bicultural heritage of New Zealand/Aotearoa; respect the diversity of cultures in New Zealand/Aotearoa; work to reduce discrimination based on sexual orientation; assist any other charity or other charitable purposes which in the opinion of the Trust Board, and in accordance with the objects of the Trust, it may be desirable to assist; work co-operatively with; people or organisations who work to support the Rainbow Community; people or organisations who work to support at risk members of the Rainbow Community; people or organisations working with those members of the Rainbow Community living with HIV or those most at risk of contracting HIV; whanau, hapu, iwi, runanga and/or similar organisations exercising mana whenua in Auckland; Auckland Council, its officers, elected members and controlled organisations; act with professionalism and integrity.” TRUSTEES/BOARD MEMBERS At any time the Trust board was to have a minimum of three and a maximum of seven trustees who had the power to appoint replacements with “the requisite skills, expertise, experience and commitment to the Trust’s purposes;” if and when vacancies arose. It could also “from time to time, have regard to the desirability of at least one of the trustees being a member or representative of a particular sector or interest group or within the Rainbow Community... or tangata whenua.” Board vacancies were to be advertised. Five initial trustees would be appointed to get things rolling and they could appoint two more. The original five could only serve a single one year term, subsequent trustees could serve up to a cumulative maximum of three two-year terms. Vacancies had to be advertised to the glbti communities and existing board members would chose which applicants joined them. LIABILITIES Amongst all the other wording of the trust document was the issue of liabilities. “The Charitable Trust format was chosen because it was thought to be the best way to ensure that everything was run correctly and that there wasn't any personal liability incurred by the trustees,” Rea says, acknowledging that she herself is not a lawyer. In the wording of the document, trustees would be liable “only for any loss attributable to his or her dishonesty or to his or her wilful commission or omission of an act which he or she knows to be a breach of trust. Trustees would be “entitled to exoneration and indemnity out of the assets of the Trust for any liability which that Trustee incurs in relation to the Trust and which is not attributable to that trustee’s dishonesty or to his or her wilful commission or omission of an act which he or she knows to be a breach of trust." As a back-up “The Board may, subject to any restrictions on the giving of indemnities under any enactment, effect insurance for a Trustee or employee of the Trust. The Board may determine the amounts and the terms of conditions of any such insurance.” That's the dense stuff more or less over with. The founding trustee positions were advertised and in July 2012 an announcement was made that the first trustees were were Gresham Bradley, then-Outline manager Timothy McMichael, company director and IT project manager Megan Cunningham-Adams, cafe and bar owner Richard James, event and arts management tutor and researcher Lexie Matheson, council planner Gurv Singh and event coordinator Julie Swift. Bradley, James, Cunningham-Adams and Singh all had, and have, strong ties to GABA, the Gay Auckland Business Association. Looking back, Rea says the founding board was formed to do a hard job but they seemed to be up to it. “The first trustees were all very well qualified and experienced people.... people who had a lot of community involvement and support. We had plenty to choose from... it wasn't a case of scratching around and anybody would do. We had a good quality field and it was very hard to say to some people 'No, you haven't made the cut but there are other ways in which we would welcome your involvement,' and to give them credit most of them did that.” Asked if there was a sense that the Auckland Pride organisation should be proactive in reaching out to, reporting to, informing and communicating with the communities, Rea says “very much so. It's a community festival for the wider rainbow community. It is 'of and by.' There was to be a lot of community input through the trustees, that was what it was supposed to be about.” Communication between Pride and the communities “has to be a two-way street,” she emphasizes. Rea recalls Cunningham-Adams briefing a number of Auckland Lesbian Business Association (ALBA) gatherings on progress in the coming months, others recall the subject being to the fore at several GABA functions. Auckland City had agreed to contribute significant funding to a parade and the overall Festival would run from February 10-23, 2013. Six months away, five if you take out the Christmas/New Year period when it is difficult to get much done. Two highly-respected and experienced event managers were contracted by the Pride Trust board. Jonathan Smith would create the parade and Julian Cook would build the programme of festival events. Both would individually report directly to the board. The Big Gay Out would be an associated but separate event facilitated as in recent years by the New Zealand AIDS Foundation. A GOOD START The general feedback was that as a first effort the February 2013 Auckland Pride Festival was a very good start. The main niggle was the daytime timing of the parade, which many felt robbed it of hoped-for glamour and sizzle. There also seemed to be less Festival content by or for glbti youth than the initial consultation meetings had hoped for. But most glbti people who voiced an opinion were very happy with this first Festival. City politicians including Mayor Brown lauded it and there was anticipation of a good 2014 Auckland Pride Festival to come. Much of the planning time and resource for the Parade and Festival programme in 2013 had been taken up with laying down the template for the main events, including such dry but necessary details as budgeting, emergency services liaison, council and health and safety requirements, and assembling a large group of volunteers from scratch. Now more effort could go into content. 2014 saw an improved and well-scheduled Festival of events, an early evening parade and a boomer Proud party which attracted an estimated 1,600, mostly glbti, folk. The feeling was that Pride was starting to hit its straps. No-one probed what was happening in the background but, in retrospect, the Board seemed to have become much less communicative about its activities and make-up as the months went by. Perhaps an indicator of things to come had been the loss of the parade's founding creator, Jonathan Smith. Contracted to do the heavy lifting of creating the first parade, Smith had right of refusal to do the 2014 parade as well. He declined due, he said at the time, to the board deciding that the parade organiser position would no longer report directly to – and have right of free and easy access to - the board but instead would report to the Festival's events organiser. In fact, other fundamental changes were taking place all but unnoticed. Towards the end of 2014, as the shit began to hit the fan – more of which later - it would become apparent that the Auckland Pride Festival Trust trustees, and we still don't really know who those trustees all were at that point, had decided to stop being a charitable trust. Just days after the 2014 Pride Festival was over the Societies and Trusts division of the Companies Office received an application for the formation of Auckland Pride Festival Incorporated, an incorporated society. (Surprisingly, a check back through the Companies' Office online records turns up no formal registration of the original Auckland Pride Festival Trust.) The newly-created Auckland Pride Festival Incorporated society was, as we now know, duly registered and continues to run Auckland Pride to this day. At registration the decided maximum of seven board member positions were held by Megan Cunningham-Adams and David Coltman (co-chairs), Gurv Singh, Linda Heavey (treasurer), Lexie Matheson, Julie Swift (secretary) and Andy Jalfon. Gresham Bradley, Richard James, Tamina Cunningham-Adams, Jo Pilkington, David Wiseman, Robert Dawson, Ashley Barratt and Simon Randall would all be “consultant members”, a role that would soon become rather controversial. Consultant members, of whom it had been decided there can be a maximum of fifteen at any one time, are advisory members who are entitled to vote at the new organisation's AGMs, may assist and advise the board members but are not entitled to participate in matters of the Board unless the Board invites them to. Life members are also allowed for. With only three exceptions all fifteen signatures on the registration document were witnessed by Skot Barnett, Jalfon's partner and at that time the president of GABA. The new Incorporated Society had similarly-worded objectives to the jettisoned Trust, but gone were embracing the principals of the Treaty of Waitangi and “developing the mana and standing of the Rainbow Community and enhance the cultural richness of Auckland at large.” And the detailing of the original Charitable Trust principles as laid out in the second of the rather dense paragraphs above also didn't make it into the Incorporated Society's aims. The change from charitable Trust to an incorporated society was never made public (although at some stage subtle changes were made to the wording of the Pride website) and there appears to have been no gay community input into the creation of the incorporated society or the appointment of its board or consultant members. According to its registration document, the board can basically shoulder-tap anyone it chooses to fill any vacancies. This means it could effectively ignore any and all applications, giving rise to the fear, frequently voiced to GayNZ.com in recent months, that the existing board members could easily be stacking the board in any way they see fit. To be fair most organisations could do this but Pride's lack of transparency easily fuels such fears. It's a set-up Rea, who has been around glbti community organisations for a long time, is now concerned about. Most glbti community organisations set no limitations on their membership and in fact work hard to sign up as many members of their target communities as possible. The Pride Incorporated society specifically limits the number of members its board is ultimately responsible to to fifteen, plus any Life Members who might be appointed by the board. GayNZ.com is not aware of any life memberships having been appointed. “It's something to enclose rather than open up,” Rea observes. “It's small and tight rather than responsive, open and encompassing. It's about keeping people out isn't it. That's not inclusive, that's not what Pride was supposed to be about. It was supposed to be an organisation to assist in the delivery of the Auckland Pride Festival in cooperation with various parts of the Rainbow community.” Asked if the way the new Auckland Pride Festival Incorporated society works and deals with the gbti communities is in the spirit of what was intended by those who participated in the original public consultation meetings, Rea is quite clear in her view. “From what I've seen, no. I'm reluctant to criticise because I know what a difficult job it is, but [the board] should not be putting itself in the position where it is vulnerable to this kind of criticism - and a closed organisation unfortunately will attract that.” Asked what initial basic advice she herself would give the Board she responds unequivocally: “Trust the people, our glbti communities can sometimes be messy and difficult to deal with, but you'll do better with openness rather than 'closed-ness.'” By their very title the consultant members were surely intended to carry out some of the input and advice function Rea and others see as so essential for any glbti community organisation. But, as we shall see in the next article of this series on Auckland Pride, to this day there appear to have been few if any invitations for the grandly-titled 'consultant members' to actually advise or consult. No requests for advice or overview came even when the Pride Board began making decisions which it later admitted were unwise or inappropriate. Or when the board all but stopped communicating publicly with the glbti communities. Or when it lost one more of its creative and organisational powerhouses in a still only partially-revealed dispute which it tried to facetiously characterise as his leaving “to pursue other interests.” Or when one of the board's own members resigned, calling the board "dysfunctional." And as far as we can tell the Society has never called for applications to join the ranks of its consultant members. And if it has added or lost any we don't know that from the Board either. To this day it is not obvious to the glbti communities who all the Auckland Pride Festival Incorporated's board or consultant members actually are. Some board members whose names we have informally become aware of seem to have already come and gone in the society's fifteen month existence. The society has called for applications to join them but has never of its own accord advised the community who were the successful applicants. And it has never voluntarily explained any departures. On its own website as of last night the Auckland Pride Festival Incorporated society listed its board members as Megan Cunningham-Adams (Chair), Julie Swift (Secretary), Richard James (Treasurer), Phylesha Brown-Acton, Paul Patton, Gav Hyde and Executive Officer Linda Heavey. We have a feeling some of those names are out of date and hope that the Executive Officer, who is employed by the board, is not actually also on the board as the website list seems to imply. On Tuesday, in part two of this series, we'll recount our understanding of the dramas which unfolded in the lead-up to, and running of, Auckland Pride Festival 2015. Perspective and comment for that article will be provided by two of the consultant members whose worries about the Pride Board and the way it operates seem to be in line with several of their peers. Note: GayNZ.com Daily News has been trying to arrange an interview to put the questions raised in this and forthcoming articles in this series to the Pride Board since mid-April. After months of silences, delays and a last-minute postponement the latest from Pride is that they will be available for an interview this Friday. Part two of this series of features, "Auckland Pride Pt2: Things go awry..." can be read here. Jay Bennie - 21st June 2015