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A charity which claimed nearly $1 million in community grants to run a rarely-opened children’s library and wrongly claimed to be a registered childcare facility appears to have closed its doors permanently.
The Angel’s Children’s Education Foundation’s website has been offline since Stuff’s story about the charity was published last October, and sometime before mid-December, it had quit its Auckland headquarters, leaving behind empty bookshelves.
Its website is down, and its 0800 number has been disconnected.
The charity faces an “active” investigation from the Department of Internal Affairs’ (DIA) gambling compliance unit and potential civil action from one of the poker machine trusts which funded it.
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It’s understood police may also be making enquiries.
But the pokie grants researcher who lodged that DIA complaint is worried that nobody will be held accountable for the charity’s activities.
The Foundation had claimed to run a registered childcare, story time and puppet sessions, a free library and a bookshop, also boasted links to the Ministries of Education and Social Development, Immigration New Zealand and Auckland Council.
But none of those government bodies had heard of the charity and when alerted by Stuff, demanded their logos be removed from the site. The Ministry of Education also denied the foundation was registered for childcare and after-school care.
The charity was also issued a warning by the Charities Commission for not filing its accounts, and uploaded two years’ worth within 48 hours of Stuff’s enquiries.
When Stuff had on five separate occasions visited the foundation’s premises in a strip mall in Rosedale, north Auckland, the doors were locked, and the building deserted – even during its advertised Saturday afternoon story time session.
Books remained in the same position on the shelves between the first visit and the last. Phone calls and emails went unanswered.
The foundation’s website went down for “scheduled maintenance” shortly after Stuff’s report, and remains down. The foundation has no other online presence.
That site formerly boasted of being “deeply committed to a goal of helping families across New Zealand by providing early childhood education” and had a “mission to help our child developing [sic] the good habits before the age of 12”, and claimed it ran toddler’s ‘wriggle and rhyme’ sessions, holiday programmes, puppeteering workshops, an online bookshop, storytelling sessions and a library open six days a week with about 730 books (in comparison, the local Auckland council library had 16,273 children’s books).
The charity’s chair, Xingyue ‘Summer’ Sun, previously told Stuff she had been busy and had little contact with the organisation and didn’t know what activities it was undertaking, while fellow trustee Shun Liebenberg, whom Sun described as the manager, didn’t return calls and instead sent a text message saying, in part, “I don’t think we are interested in what you offer”.
When Stuff called Sun this week, she said: “I have nothing to say. I already resigned. I resigned after you called me.”
When told the Charities Commission website listed her as the trust’s sole trustee and chair in an update made on October 27 by Liebenberg, she said it was wrong. Asked who to contact, she said: “I have no idea”.
Liebenberg did not return calls for comment. An email to the charity bounced back.
The foundation’s financial reports showed the trust employed five full-time and one part-time staff member (in 2019, Liebenberg received $64,230 in salary), making up about three-quarters of its outgoings, and relied almost entirely on pokie grants of about $950,000 from four trusts: Blue Sky Community Trust ($629,520), Four Winds Foundations ($221,652), Grassroots ($49,889) and Dragon ($49,043). $454,816 of that arrived in the 2021 financial year.
Stuff asked all four trusts if they intended to try to clawback some of the funds and whether they would give future grants to the charity.
Four Winds deputy chairman Grant Cameron said they had read Stuff’s story “with great interest” but had already initiated an investigation, hiring a private investigator, asking questions of the charity, and taking legal advice on the prospect of taking civil proceedings to have the funds returned.
He confirmed they would not entertain any further applications from the charity.
Grassroots executive chair Martin Bradley said their grant was for furniture and renovations and had satisfied their accountability processes; they had not funded any salary, rent or operational costs and had declined subsequent applications as “we could not be satisfied about the operation of the Foundation”.
Dragon and BlueSky, and Jackson Rao, who administrates both trusts, had not responded to enquiries before deadline.
Grants researcher Bridget Frame said she wanted to know who would be held accountable.
“It’s great they seem to be closing up shop,” she said, “but there seem to be no consequences to these actions for the people involved with the funder, the venues or the charity, which is frustrating. I hope that the regulator does its job and delves into the decisions and relationships with all three of these parties.”
Frame said the apparent model of the charity was far from an isolated one, and she had compiled a list of other charities which appeared to operate a similar model.
“These are not victimless actions. This is real money being deprived from [other charitable] organisations which can make a difference in their communities.”
The DIA said its gambling compliance unit could not comment due to the “active nature of the investigation” and said Charities Services also had an ongoing inquiry, and was awaiting a response from the Foundation.
The Ministry of Education’s acting leader of operations and integration, Helen Hurst, said they had taken no action against the charity because the website had been taken down.
Auckland Council had written a please-explain letter to the charity.
Liebenberg had replied, apologising and promising to remove their logo. Spokeswoman Jo Davidson said the council then had no need to take further action.
Police refused to comment on the matter.
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