The Hapai Foundation (https://www.hapaifoundation.org.nz/about-hapai) has been around in one form or another since the 1960s and was recently rebranded in its current form. Their aim is to “…drive personalised, holistic support for people with disabilities, with a focus on empowering people and whānau in their communities.”
A huge part of making any charity tick is funding and the Hapai Foundation have approached this in a different way, where those who will benefit the most from the work of the foundation, also help fund it. This has been done with the creation of a Hapai Access Card, which is a physical card that the disabled use to make it clear to business the barriers they face when purchasing a product, or service.
If you’re not familiar with the Hapai Access Card then there’s a great clip from TVNZ’s One News that can be found at the top of the Hapai Access Card website (https://www.hapaifoundation.org.nz/) that we encourage you to watch as it’s a nice summary of the very real impact this card can have.
So there are two sides to the equation here, with one being the education and onboarding of businesses that the disabled community can then access with confidence that their needs will be understood and met. The other side is the disabled community themselves purchasing the card, which starts to grow a revenue stream for the foundation, so that it can fund worthy projects.
Assura Software is very proud to be associated with the Hapai Access Card and we’re supporting this initiative and growth with both money and the free provision of a workflow solution to help them efficiently cater with the onboarding of businesses without needing greater volunteer, or paid resources.
“We started out capturing a new business’s response to the barriers using a spreadsheet and were soon faced with the problem that it would not scale. Today we have over 100 businesses in the pipeline and without the Assura solution we would never be able to cope. Now a business can complete most of the process themselves, saving us time and cost”. Loudon Keir Exec Manager – The Hāpai Access Card.
If you’d like to support the Hapai Access Card then please reach out to them via their webpage, or if you know someone with a disability encourage them to sign up and remember that your support can help the roughly 1,000,000 New Zealanders who have a disability.
