“There is only one good reason to make more money than you need, and that is so you can have more to give away.”

An open letter to kiwis who can help children in need

Let me share a little story about my ‘Ma’ with you. As well as teaching me how to pronounce my surname (“it’s “Sprowwell”, as in “Owl”, not “Sprawl”, as in “all-over-the-floor”, my grandmother, Ma Sproull, also taught me a valuable lesson that has shaped much of my life ever since.

“Malcolm”, she said, “there is only one good reason to make more money than you need, and that is so you can have more to give away.”

Ma was born in 1888 in Otago. Her parents immigrated here from Ireland, motivated by the need to escape the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. It was a time before antibiotics or most of anything else we take for granted in modern society. Families of six-plus children were not unusual, just as it was common to expect only four of them to survive to adulthood due to various untreatable diseases. Death was never far away and very much less sanitised than we experience today in western cultures.

After her marriage in 1911 to my Glasgow-born grandfather, they raised six children, lived through two world wars and the worst depression the world has ever experienced. Of their four sons, two fought in World War Two, and one, my father, was held in a German prisoner of war camp for four years.

All the while, Ma Sproull kept a glass jar in her kitchen where she kept surplus money available to help people who might be “down on their luck.” It was more money than she needed, and others could make better use of it.

It’s a different privilege to be living in New Zealand today which has the lowest infant mortality rates in the world. Yet right in our backyard, island nations like Kiribati have one of the highest infant mortality rates in the Pacific region.

Driven by the spirit of philanthropy that I inherited from Ma, I now work for ChildFund. We work directly in parts of the world where people are sadly “down on their luck”. And in that number, those who mattered most to my grandmother, and likewise to me, are the innocent children who are marginalised for no fault of their own. Helping vulnerable children is why I do what I do and what ChildFund stands for.

Since World War Two, organisations like ChildFund supported by people like my grandmother have helped significantly reduce global poverty, yet there are still 700 million people worldwide living in extreme poverty. They survive on less than NZ$3 a day. That includes an estimated 356 million children.

Ma once reminded me “We Kiwis are disproportionately blessed. We owe it to others to share a bit of that.” Today I am writing this letter to ask you to revive that spirit of generosity. Please contact me or my team at ChildFund today to discuss how you can help children in the Pacific and over the world.

“We live in an imperfect world, Malcolm. That does not mean we must let it dictate how we act in the world, though. We need to be better than what the world coughs up”.

Ma Sproull, a generous woman. (1888 – 1984).