Funding Update

The Trust is grateful to the New Zealand Government which continues to fund the Trust’s core operations costs for the 2021-22 financial year. This funding, delivered through the Ministry for Culture and Heritage under the auspices of our responsible Minister, Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern, in her capacity as Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage ensures every dollar donated to the Trust this year will go directly to programme delivery.

Inspiring Explorers™ Fund

In April the Trust launched the Inspiring Explorers™ Fund. This exciting new initiative is helping to grow the next generation of inspiring connected youth with an explorer mindset. Spanning a wide variety of programmes from Inspiring Explorers Expeditions™ to Inspiring Explorers™ Education the diverse programme engages and inspires youth with the incredible legacy of exploration we care for, ensuring it is relevant, accessible and meaningful in today’s world.

We are delighted to share that our launch match challenge appeal was successfully completed on 30 June 2021. We reached our goal of raising an initial $150,000, which becomes $300,000 towards the Fund thanks to the generous 1:1 match funds offered by a few key donors. Thank you to all our supporters who donated to the launch of the Inspiring Explorers™ Fund. We hope you have enjoyed reading some of the ways your gift is already making an impact in this newsletter.

We are looking to grow support for the Inspiring Explorers™ Fund and programme to engage and connect more youth with exploration. Learn more here.

Grant Success

The Trust is particularly grateful to the New Zealand Lottery Grants Board for a $193,000 grant to assist a major cataloguing project of the Trust’s image collection which contains around 100,000 images.

Over the next two years a team of four full time project technicians will work to transition the Trust’s current image assets (which are a mix of digital and hardcopy) and associated metadata, to an online database called Recollect.

The project also includes the development of a public website portal that will make an extensive collection of images available to the public and showcase Antarctica’s most important historic assets being restored, maintained and managed.