Paul Dickson

When Paul Dickson founded Oke Charity, it wasn’t to create another well-meaning initiative. It was to rethink what charity could look like.

After years in automotive, power and infrastructure, Paul stepped away from a successful corporate career in 2013. Burnout forced a pause — and in that space, he began to notice something. In education and community spaces, there wasn’t a lack of passion. There was often a lack of systems thinking.

Oke was built on that gap.

Rather than launching programmes that rely on short-term energy, Paul applies project discipline to community challenges. When there was little research on the wellbeing impacts of outdoor classrooms, Oke partnered with the Early Learning Lab to initiate longitudinal research. When composting systems in schools weren’t working, they partnered with the University of Auckland to engineer a scalable solution.

For Paul, charity isn’t about good intentions. It’s about infrastructure.

If sustainability were a flower in his life, it would be a dandelion. “Those bad boys grow anywhere… and they still bloom.” To him, sustainability is resilience — building things that survive funding gaps, policy changes and scepticism while still delivering value. What nurtures it? “Consistency. Turning up. Doing the work even when it’s not glamorous.”

His biggest challenge is making sustainability stick beyond enthusiasm. “If it relies on one passionate teacher or one funding round, it won’t last.” Real impact means embedding systems so the work continues when people change roles and budgets shift.

He resonates deeply with kaitiakitanga — stewardship. Growing up on a council estate in Birmingham, he learned early that if you didn’t take responsibility for your environment, no one else would. That same mindset now underpins Oke’s work: build it well, pass it on better.

When it comes to ESG, Paul often starts by not calling it ESG at all. He reads the room — whether it’s teachers, engineers or corporate teams — and focuses on practical outcomes. “Sustainability works best when it invites people in.”

If his work plants one seed, it’s this: that the next generation grows up seeing sustainability as normal. Not a campaign. Not a debate. Just part of how things are done.

Read Paul’s full answers to Blooming Sustainability to explore how he’s reshaping charity into something built to last.

BLOOMING  Sustainability Questionnaire

Name: Paul Dickson

Company & Title: Oke Charity – Good EGG (Executive Go-Getter) & Founder

Website & LinkedIn Profile: www.oke.org.nz & https://www.linkedin.com/company/oke-charity

* Guiding Values | Kaupapa

If sustainability were a flower blooming in your life, what would it look like? What nurtures it?

It would be a dandelion. Those bad boys grow anywhere. Crack in the concrete, harsh soil, neglected corner and they still bloom. People don’t quite know how they do it, but they just keep showing up year after year.

Sustainability, to me, is about resilience. It’s about building things that survive tough seasons, funding gaps, policy changes, scepticism and still deliver value to community.

What nurtures it? Consistency. Turning up. Doing the work even when it’s not glamorous.

A quote, personal motto or whakataukī that reflects your vision:

My personal motto is “Keep Right On.”

It’s the song sung on the terraces of my boyhood football club. The meaning is simple, no matter how hard the road, you keep going right to the end. That’s served me well in life and in building Oke.

There have been plenty of moments where it would’ve been easier to pivot, shrink or give up. But if the work matters, you keep going. The good times come when you’ve got through the tough ones.

If you could mentor a rising change-maker in Aotearoa, what advice would you share?  
As for being a mentor, I’m mentoring a young person every day, my son, Taylor.

He was 14 months old at Oke’s first working bee. He’s grown up around wheelbarrows, working bees, spreadsheets and hard conversations. These days, people are blown away when this 10-year-old is pushing barrows, building garden beds and getting stuck in without any fuss.

He’s seen that running something like Oke isn’t easy and that change doesn’t happen overnight, which in this current climate of instant gratification is key life skill.

* Leading Change | Arataki

A key moment in your journey that shaped your path:
In 2013, I made the decision to step away from a successful career in project management. On paper, everything was going well. I’d built a solid career across the automotive, power and infrastructure sectors, and the work had taken me around the world. But behind the scenes, the 60-hour weeks were catching up with me. Burnout was real, and I could feel it.

So I stepped away, without a clear plan. It wasn’t a strategic pivot. It was more of a necessity.

Over the next couple of years, I took on contracting work, became a dad, and got involved in a few community projects. That period gave me space to think. What I began to notice was that in the education and non-profit space, there wasn’t a lack of passion, there was often a lack of systems thinking and structured implementation.

My background wasn’t in teaching or social services. It was in delivery. In infrastructure. In identifying a problem and designing a solution that would actually work long-term.

That realization, that my skill set might be useful in a sector that didn’t traditionally draw from it, ultimately led to the creation of Oke.

It wasn’t about starting a charity for the sake of it. It was about applying project discipline and practical problem-solving to spaces that deserved robust solutions. Looking back, stepping away from the corporate world wasn’t the easy option but it was the right one.

What’s the main challenge you face in driving sustainability within your sector?

The biggest challenge is making sustainability stick beyond enthusiasm.

Schools are full of good intentions. Communities care. But the education system is under pressure in terms of funding, curriculum demands and growing societal issues. Sustainability is often seen as an “extra” on top of all that.

If it relies on one passionate teacher or one funding round, it won’t last and that’s me speaking from experience.

The real challenge is embedding systems so the work continues when people change roles, funding cycles shift, or energy dips. That’s where design and strategy matters more than inspiration.

An area you need more support with:
Long-term aligned funding.

Over the past decade, we’ve demonstrated repeatedly that we know how to design and implement infrastructure that works. We’ve seen what sustains impact and what doesn’t. We’ve gathered the data. We’ve refined the model.

And yet, like many community-based organisations focused on long-term systems change, we often find ourselves competing for short-term funding while “quick win” initiatives attract larger budgets.

What we’ve observed is that sustainability and ESG teams genuinely value the depth and measurable impact of what we’re building but often the available funding sits elsewhere, frequently within marketing budgets that prioritise visibility over longevity.

There’s nothing wrong with storytelling. But sustainable change requires investment in infrastructure, not just campaigns.

If we’re serious about long-term environmental and social outcomes, funding structures need to align with the ambitions of the right people.

An Indigenous perspective you admire and want people to be mindful of:

Kaitiakitanga, the principle of guardianship, is one that resonates deeply with me.

I didn’t grow up with Te Ao Māori. I grew up on a council estate in Birmingham. Unbeknown to me, kaitiakitanga was instilled in me on those streets.

Where I’m from, you didn’t wait for someone else to fix your environment. You looked after your space. You looked out for your neighbours. You made the best of what you had because if you didn’t take responsibility for it, no one else would.

There’s a strong working-class mentality in that, pride, ownership, resilience, and an understanding that what you build or protect today shapes what the next generation inherits.

That’s why kaitiakitanga feels familiar to me. It’s not about ownership in a commercial sense. It’s about stewardship. It’s about knowing you’re holding something temporarily, and your job is to pass it on in better shape.

In schools, when tamariki begin to see themselves as kaitiaki of their environment, it changes behaviour. It creates pride. It builds accountability.

For me, the language may be different from where I started in Birmingham, but the underlying principle, responsibility to place and people, is something I’ve carried my whole life.

Your best approach for engaging stakeholders in meaningful dialogue about ESG:

Often, it starts by not calling it ESG at all.

Through Oke, I move between school communities, engineers, researchers, corporate sustainability teams and marketing departments. Each room speaks a different language. If I walk into a school talking about ESG targets, I’ll get blank looks. If I sit with engineers and avoid technical detail, I’ll lose credibility. So I read the room.

With schools, we talk about kids, confidence, waste that actually gets reduced, and systems that make their lives easier. With the University of Auckland School of Engineering, we go deep into design parameters and data. With corporate teams, we connect those outcomes to measurable impact and reporting frameworks.

The common thread is humility.

In my experience, sustainability can sometimes be presented in a way that feels high and mighty, as if it’s a badge of knowledge rather than a shared responsibility. That tone can shut people out before the conversation even starts.

My approach is different. Meet people where they are. Use language that resonates with them. Focus on practical outcomes rather than moral positioning. When people feel respected rather than judged, trust builds. And once trust is there, you can connect the work to the broader ESG conversation in a way that feels inclusive rather than ideological.

Sustainability works best when it invites people in.

What do you think is Aotearoa’s superpower in creating a sustainable future?

We often talk about the #8 wire mentality as a national strength and in many ways it is. It’s led to creative solutions and ideas that have travelled the world. But if I’m honest, that same mentality can sometimes lean toward short-term fixes rather than long-term systems changes.

Having worked in the geothermal space, I’ve seen first-hand that New Zealand has the technical knowledge, engineering capability and natural resources to be genuinely world-leading in renewable energy. We’re not short on expertise. We’re not short on innovation. What tends to get in the way are political cycles and competing agendas.

Where I think our real superpower lies is in something deeper, the opportunity to combine Indigenous knowledge of this land with world-class scientific and engineering capability. We have mātauranga Māori that understands the rhythms, responsibilities and long-term stewardship of place. We also have engineers and scientists capable of designing complex, high-performance systems.

If those two knowledge systems are genuinely respected and integrated, not tokenized, Aotearoa could demonstrate to the world what it looks like when cultural wisdom and technical precision co-exist.

That’s not a branding exercise. That’s a systems opportunity. And if we chose to back it properly, we could move from talking about sustainability to actually embodying it.

* Surfing the Green Wave | Kakariki

Books, podcasts, courses or other resources that profoundly shaped your approach to sustainability:

I’ve never really been drawn to the lifestyle side of sustainability. I’m more interested in systems, how things actually work.

In a New Zealand context, I’ve appreciated Emily King’s writing. She talks about productivity, economic structure and long-term positioning in a way that connects sustainability to resilience. It’s not fluffy. It’s about building a country that can stand on its own feet.

From a more aspirational angle, I’ve found Dr. Christoph Schmitz’s work at Acker interesting. It’s engineering meeting food systems. Controlled environments, precision, design. It shows what’s possible when sustainability is treated as a technical challenge to be solved properly.

I also listen to Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg. It’s useful because it brings business, science and policy into the same conversation. That’s where real change tends to sit, in the messy middle between sectors.

At the end of the day, I’m drawn to thinking that treats sustainability as infrastructure, not branding.

Events in Aotearoa or globally that you think are must-attend:

I’m heading along to the Cleantech Expo Auckland this April, and that’s my kind of event. Engineers, innovators, infrastructure people, talking about systems that either work or they don’t. No hiding behind good intentions.

Those are the rooms where sustainability becomes practical. Renewable energy, waste tech, electrification, real conversations about what it takes to build and maintain these systems long term.

Globally, I’d love to get to ChangeNOW in Paris one day. What appeals to me isn’t the scale of it, it’s the mix. Entrepreneurs, engineers, investors and policy makers in the same space. If we’re serious about sustainability, those worlds need to overlap.

For me, the best events aren’t the most polished, they’re the ones where you leave with something tangible. An idea you can test. A connection you can follow up on. A solution you can actually implement.

That’s where progress tends to start.

A sustainable initiative or project in Aotearoa that deserves more attention:

Someone who is taking sustainable inititives by the horns, is Professor Saeid Baroutian at the University of Auckland and deserves far more attention than he receives.

He works at the coalface of sustainable technology; resource recovery, circular systems, waste innovation. Not theory. Not branding. Engineering.

Through his work and through the cleantech ventures he’s co-founded like Gaiatech and Nurox Hydrothermal, he’s tackling very real environmental challenges, from anaesthetic gas capture to hazardous medical waste destruction. These are not headline-grabbing lifestyle initiatives. They’re complex, technical and essential.

Saeid, his team and I are collaborating on a school composting project, and what I value most is the mindset. It’s rigorous. It’s measured. It’s solution-first.

I sometimes think we celebrate the visible parts of sustainability more than the technical backbone that makes it possible. The engineers, scientists and innovators building scalable systems don’t always get the spotlight.

But without them, none of the ambition stacks up.

If your work could plant one seed of change for the future, what would it be?

If my work could plant one seed of change, it would be that the next generation grows up thinking sustainability is normal. Not a campaign. Not a debate. Just part of how things are done on a day to day basis.

If kids grow up understanding stewardship, systems and responsibility, because they’ve experienced it firsthand in their schools and communities, then the future doesn’t need saving. It’s already being shaped.

And if that becomes ordinary, we’ve done something right.

The leader(s) you endorse for a future edition of Blooming Sustainability:

If you haven’t already, I think a Saeid Baroutian would make an excellent contributor to future Blooming Sustainability edition.

* One actionable takeaway for our readers to make a change today for a brighter tomorrow:

Take a hard look at one system you’re part of; your workplace, your school, your organization and ask yourself whether sustainability is actually built into how it runs, or whether it’s something that gets talked about when it suits. If it’s sitting on the side as a project, a campaign, or a poster on the wall, start a conversation about how to embed it properly into the way things operate. Not louder. Not trendier. Just better designed. That’s where the real shift happens.

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