Dame Julie Chapman: Founding charities on passion

North Shore based Dame Julie Chapman was awarded a DNZM in this year’s New Year’s Honours for “services to children and the community.” That standard statement scarcely seems to do justice to what she has achieved. Christine Young talks to Dame Julie about her achievements, her background and what drives her in her work for children and animals.

Dame Julie is the founder and driving force behind two distinct charities, though both centre around the wellbeing of families under stress. KidsCan, founded in 2005, aims to ensure all children have the opportunity to succeed in education; Pet Refuge was founded eight years ago so that pets are able to be cared for as families seek refuge from violence.

Dame Julie says her motivation in each is “about helping people and wanting to make a difference for people less fortunate.” She attributes her approach to her life and work to her parents, Kenneth and Alice, who were “very community-minded. Dad was a DOC [Department of Conservation] ranger, and mum was involved in the church.” Being involved in the community “was part of my growing up,” she says, adding that as a child she “used to rescue anything that needed rescuing. We had cats, dogs, a horse, birds, ducks. Especially cats.” She retains a special fondness for cats. But more of her collection of pets later.

Julie grew up on the Shore, in Glenfield, before moving to a bush block in Oratia that was clearly formative in her love of animals. Once she finished school and went flatting, she moved back to the Shore, where KidsCan is based.

KidsCan now supports over 70,000 children in more than 1,100 schools and 200 early childhood centres, and is the recent recipient of a two-year government grant to provide food for an additional 10,000 under-five-year-olds. It provides children living in poverty with the food, footwear and clothing they need to ensure they can attend and succeed at school. The charity was founded, Julie says, after hearing media reports about how kids did not have what they needed to start the school year. “I found that interesting and unfair.” A self-described ideas person, who says that even now her team “is there to moderate my crazy ideas and to help bring through those with great return,” she looked at how she could help.

Dame Julie’s ideas are based on research, and her first step to forming KidsCan was to see if there was a charity that addressed material hardship. She surveyed 80 low decile schools, and “got an amazing response around the need for warm clothing, shoes and food and that the lack of these was a major barrier to access to education.

“I was brought up [with the ethos] that with education comes opportunity. I wanted to ensure that all children had the basic essentials to access that opportunity.”

KidsCan started by providing raincoats, footwear and basic food products to children from 40 schools around New Zealand. She says the situation now is as bad as it has ever been for many families. “Nutritional and material hardship have got worse over the last few years. I wouldn’t have thought that 21 years later I would be trying to work out how to support the 70-plus schools on the waiting list, and another 172 on the early childhood centre waiting list.”

Similar to the school programme, the KidsCan early childhood centre programme provides “food, jackets, shoes, gumboots and headlice treatments.” While she’s grateful for the grant to supply food to an additional 10,000 under-fives, she’s now trying to work out how to raise the funds to offer the full KidsCan programme to these children.

Unlike charities that rely largely on grant funding and donations, under Julie’s leadership KidsCan has built an impressive, diversified balance sheet. While she’s been hugely successful with one-off initiatives (like the 2009 Telethon) to raise funds, she knows that such events, while important financially and in terms of profile-raising, are not sustainable. “I learned very early on how important it is to have a diverse range of income streams,” she says. Also aware that government funding can come and go as political winds change, she ensures that such funding makes up no more than 20-25% of KidsCan’s income. Equally, “when we bring a school or early childhood centre into the programme, it’s important to [ensure we can] support it as long as they need.

“It’s not something to celebrate that we are in 1,100-plus schools, but I’m proud that we are able to create sustainable revenue streams.” These include corporate sponsorship to monthly and in-kind donations, partnership income, community fundraisers and general donations. (Full details of KidsCan operations and funding can be found in the 2023 annual report on the KidsCan website: www.kidscan.org.nz/media/rd1jczyg/kidscan-annual-report-2023.pdf.)

Over the years, Julie has garnered considerable publicity for KidsCan, and more recently for Pet Refuge. Not all of it has been welcome; social media has amplified opportunities for people, often hiding behind false accounts, to make false and “nasty” comments about her. She even considered not accepting her honour for this reason, but she’s philosophical about the reality. “I’ve always believed you should never take criticism from people you wouldn’t take advice from,” she says. “I feel a bit sorry for people who feel the need to run down those they don't know, and I now don't pay attention to the comments. At heart, I do the work I do because I want to help people.”

Despite rumours to the contrary, all her work with Pet Refuge is voluntary, though of course it takes time. “But I am becoming more balanced. And I have a great team of people,” – more than 40 in the fundraising and logistics teams at KidsCan, and nearly 20 at Pet Refuge, which is a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week operation.

“I can’t do something I can’t believe in; I have to passionately believe in the cause,” says Dame Julie. A strong belief in the empowering impact of education drove KidsCan, while her love of animals drove the formation of Pet Refuge.

The purpose of Pet Refuge is “to remove a major barrier to pets and their families escaping domestic violence,” with a vision of “a New Zealand where pets and their owners don’t have to live with domestic violence.”

To those ends, Pet Refuge provides temporary shelter for pets from around New Zealand affected by domestic violence, keeping them safe while their owners escape abuse. Julie, an only child, was able to purchase the land for Pet Refuge after her parents died about six months apart in 2014.

Already heavily committed with her work as CEO and trustee of KidsCan, Julie was “looking for something to do with animals,” when a chance conversation made her aware of the need to protect and care for pets so women and children could leave violent family situations. “That was a lightbulb moment for me,” she says. 

As she did when starting KidsCan, she looked for research, and found a report (‘Pets as Pawns’, 2012) written by Women’s Refuge and SPCA that revealed “a massive gap and a huge need while families are getting their lives back on track.”  In typical style, she picked up the phone and called Women’s Refuge CEO Dr Ange Jury. “She was on board immediately,” says Julie, and Pet Refuge was under way.

Pet Refuge works closely with Women’s Refuge and the New Zealand Police, the charity’s biggest referral partners. As well as providing shelter to a wide range of pets, Pet Refuge is part of escape plans as women and children leave the situations they find themselves in. As in KidsCan, her passion for the cause and her ability to advocate for it has translated into invaluable partnerships. “It comes back to believing in what I do. What motivates them to get involved is my passion and that of the team.”

Julie says that when research was undertaken in 2019, what shocked her most was the sadistic nature of how men (usually) used family pets as a means of control. She’s pleased to be able to provide a “home away from home” and care for pets traumatised by the abuse they’ve experienced or witnessed. “The goal is that the pet leaves the Pet Refuge facility in a better state than they arrive.”

Dame Julie says she is “naturally an introvert.” An ideal weekend involves “hanging out” with her husband Cain, watching movies and catching up with good friends. Oh, and spending time with her own extensive collection of pun-ily named pets; her own personal menagerie of those needing support: 13 cats, two dogs, eight goats, a steer, a budgie and a sparrow, with names like Vincent van Goat, Amy Winegoat, and Sparrowlyn Monroe.

Dame Julie has dedicated the last 20 years to channelling her beliefs and passion into building two extraordinary charities, that have had and will continue to have positive impacts on those they touch. Her DNZM is fitting recognition.