Director's altruistic aside

Jon Hartley's concern was two-fold.

The Yorkshire-born, New Zealand company director had been asked to fundraise for VisionFund International's microfinance plans for Cambodia and he was travelling there in 2003 to undertake due diligence.

Firstl Mr Hartley was astonished and slightly ashamed to discover Cambodia's troubled history – the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot and a genocide in which about 1.7 million people lost their lives.

Somehow that escaped his attention while he was studying to be a chartered accountant in London.

"The other thing I was apprehensive about was I really wanted microfinance to work and I didn't want to have to come back and tell World Vision it didn't work.

"It literally took me a morning there to realise that I'd seen something that I thought had some really amazing characteristics, if done well."

And so began Mr Hartley's decade-long foray into part-time volunteering.

He has juggled directorships – including current roles as ASB Bank's deputy chairman of ASB Bank and Sovereign, and a director of Chorus – with his two-day a week volunteering commitments.

As NBR noted in February, Mr Hartley stepped down from Mighty River Power's board citing his commitments to VisionFund.

He is vice chairman of VisionFund International, a trustee of World Vision NZ – the Kiwi arm of the global Christian relief and development organisation – and a Wellington City Mission trustee.

"The idea of giving away myself in a volunteer sense came from my faith, to be quite honest.

"Giving money if you've got money is really great and really helpful but it actually doesn't engage you as much as giving your time and your skills."

Huge loans book

VisionFund International works in 36 developing countries.

When Mr Hartley started in 2003 – helping to raise $2 million for the Cambodian microfinance work – the organisation had total loans of $US18 million. Its loan portfolio has grown to about $US455 million to more than 800,000 borrowers.

In 10 years, it dispersed 6.6 million loans valued at $US3.5 billion.

In Cambodia, its client based has swollen from about 4000 to 150,000, with an average loan size of $US300 – less than half the organisation’s average of $US666. The rate of default in Cambodia is less than 1%, compared to its international average over the last five years of 2.4%.

The call on Mr Hartley’s time has varied. He chairs VisonFund's risk committee and has been deputy chairmain for nearly three years.

He also mentors VisionFund executives and directors, right now in Zambia, Kenya and the United States.

"I would be engaged at a fiduciary director level like everybody else – we meet twice a year face-to-face, and we meet twice a year by telephone, our committees run four times a year, predominantly by telephone. So all that normal sort of stuff.

"Over and above that I've been instrumental in developing some of the work we do in south-east Asia around fundraising – so I've spent a lot of time helping establish major donor fundraising up in Singapore and building an opportunity for people like myself, equivalent to volunteering in our network in South East Asia."

Turnaround plan

And then there are the human stories.

Mr Hartley was in the room when a Cambodian woman from a rural village revealed her post-GFC turnaround plan.

He said the woman had bought a silk-weaving loom with her loan money but her usual marketplace – tourists and exports to the United States through a cloth exporter – had dried up.

Her revenue was down by 50% but she announced her intentions to bring her sister into her silk weaving business on the cheap and borrow more money from VisionFund to plant cassava and breed pigs.

"That was her turnaround plan and she successfully implemented it,” Mr Hartley says.

“And she didn't default on her loan and worked her way through and satisfied not only the lending side of it but also satisfied the income side of it from her family's point of view."

VisionFund is rebalancing its portfolio – focusing more on Africa and Asia and slowly pulling out of eastern Europe where, Mr Hartley says, its work is largely done.

Mr Hartley, who turns 60 later this year, is also rebalancing.

He will come off VisionFund's Cambodian board and become involved in Myanmar once a limited liability company has been established there, as the organisation chases its goal of lifting 3.5 million children out of poverty by 2015.

And so his second decade of volunteering begins.

"It's an amazing experience to hear what people can do with a very small amount of money,” he concludes.

dwilliams@nbr.co.nz