833 listings, three weeks.

The growth

Three weeks ago the directory had 229 listings. Only 144 were verified. All 833 are verified now. Every one was read from the funder's own current page by a person. None of it was carried over from an old list or another site.

It came in bursts. Some days nothing got added. On 4 September, 150 university and wānanga scholarships went up in one sweep. Other pushes covered every Iwi-Māori Partnership Board, every gaming trust, and professional bodies most directories skip: engineering, pharmacy, surgery and banking scholarships that carry Māori eligibility criteria.

We tried whole new sectors too: telecommunications, insurance, energy companies. Almost nothing actually named Māori as an eligibility criterion. Plenty of funds have Māori recipients or Māori branding without that being a real requirement. Most of what's genuinely out there is already in the directory. The sectors still to check have a much lower hit rate than the ones already done.

What's in it

553 are funding or grants, 276 are scholarships, and a few are commissioning or support programmes. 424 are regional, 306 are open nationwide, 103 belong to one iwi or hapū.

544 are open to individuals and whānau applying directly, not just organisations. 329 are for tauira and researchers, 304 for community groups, 220 name marae and hapū, 208 are for iwi and Māori organisations.

The most common kaupapa: Mātauranga (education) on 360 listings, Rangatahi (youth) on 281, Hapori (community) on 240, Whānau on 135, Ahurea (culture) on 125, Hauora (health) on 117, Taiao (environment) on 104, Whenua (land) on 97.

478 listings state a dollar figure. Together they add up to $111.9 million. Plenty more don't give a number at all: a range, a per-project cap with no total, a pool shared between several recipients. A good number of iwi and hapū funds also sit behind a registration portal only their own members can see. We can't put a value on those at all. The real total is higher than $111.9 million. We just can't say by how much.

What's next

The directory stops chasing growth for its own sake. Two sweeps through new sectors found almost nothing. That's worth listening to. New listings will still turn up. Someone mentions a fund we missed. A funder's page turns up something else while we're checking it for something unrelated. But hunting whole new categories of funder isn't a standing job anymore.

Keeping the 833 accurate now runs on a schedule instead. Every funder link gets checked automatically every two weeks: dead links, redirects, changed wording, rounds past their closing date. A person only needs to look when that check finds something. Most fortnights it should find close to nothing.

That frees up time for reports like this one.

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