The Watson Foundation is a charitable trust set up by Cullen Investments. The main objectives of the Watson Foundation are to:

• enrich the lives of underprivileged children and young people; and
• assist with their needs, including care, support, protection, health and education.

Instead of running its own programmes, The Watson Foundation believes it can make more of a difference by making grants and donations to other charities which cater for the needs of underprivileged children and young people in particular. The Watson Foundation generally focuses on those smaller charities with little or no profile who have a difficult time raising funds.

Examples of recipients of The Watson Foundation's most recent donations include:

Guardian Angels Charitable Trust (Inc)

Guardian Angels Charitable Trust (Inc) provides support for families in our community with terminally ill children which when compounded with being financially disadvantaged, can be a very stressful time. Guardian Angels' concentration is at grass roots level - providing basic necessities such as food, blankets, firewood, bill payments (e.g. power, phone) as well as other goods and services to ease them through the most traumatic time that families could ever face in life. The focus of Guardian Angels is to support the whole family and a very important and often forgotten part of this is the siblings of the sick child who go through extremely rough times and there is often little or no time for parents to attend to them with everything else that they are dealing with.

Crosspower Ministries Trust

The Otara Youth Action Group, with help from the Ministry of Social Development, has been a strong and efficient provider of youth services in South Auckland through the Crosspower Ministries Trust. The aim is to support at-risk young people and intervene more effectively with youth offenders. There is a need to support families and communities with programmes and services which deal with the challenging and difficult behaviour of some young people. A big part of Crosspower Ministries' programmes is in encouraging young people to take on leadership roles in their community - encouraging them to reach their full potential and feel good about themselves - they are the leaders of tomorrow. Providing better options, choices, and activities for young people is a vital element in turning them away from gangs and activities ranging from sport and game afternoons to youth festivals are decent and constructive uses of young people's time.