2024 was a bit of a quieter year for Just Kai, mostly due to our founder and researcher, Heather, sustaining a concussion in January 2024 that affected her significantly throughout the year. Despite this it has been encouraging to see continuing growth in our work, and to see the team grow in boh numbers and capability.

Table of Contents

Events and Projects

  • We started the year with a table at Future Future, a sustainability-themed music festival situated on the shared cycling and walking paths around Mt Albert. Many people were keen to hear our message and we gave printed information to around 160 people.
  • We didn’t attend any further events until November, when we had tables at both the Grey Lynn Park Festival and the Devonport Ethical Christmas Market. The latter was quite quiet for us (perhaps as we have now been there many times before), but the Grey Lynn Park Festival was a great opportunity to get our message out: we gave printed material to 225 people, in all cases having a conversation with the person in the process.

Collaborations

  • Heather worked with Manna Gum, an Australian Christian organisation mid-year, being interviewed for their podcast in June writing an article for the August edition of their Manna Matters magazine. It was an interesting challenge to adapt our material for an Australian audience!

New and updated research

We did not publish any new research in 2024, although we did revise our cocoa, sugar and salmon guides.

Other publications on our website

Digital engagements

screenshot from 2025 01 11 17 00 49

We had around 8,000 unique visitors to our website in 2024, down from around 12,000 in 2023. As in previous years Easter was our busiest time, with around 1,300 site views over March.

Disappointingly, the vast majority of our page views didn’t show which pages they were viewing (of 39,000 page views, 24,000 came up as ‘not set’). From those we could see, our most popular post for 2024 was - surprisingly - our 2023 Easter list!, with 870 views. That was followed by our cocoa guide (840 views), then our 2024 Easter list (661 views)

Over 2024 we had 4,580 clicks from people finding Just Kai via Google search. The most popular search terms were: “Just Kai”, followed by “Kingfisher prawns” and “wildcaught salmon nz”. A number of searchers appeared to be looking for information on seafood of various kinds, which was encouraging to see.

Followers

  • Our main web presence other than our website is Facebook. We now have 611 followers there, up from 501 two years ago;
  • We have 133 followers on Instagram, up from 28 two years ago;
  • We have 25 followers on LinkedIn.
  • We are no longer using our X/Twitter account.

Income and expenditure

Expenditure

In previous years Just Kai has had very few expenses; this year has been very different. We spent a total of $2647.42 in 2024. This was spent on:

  • research assistance (we now have a part-time paid research assistant): $1482
  • events (entrance fees, transport, one-off purchases such as a table and gazebo): $575.44
  • digital presence (domain name, email addresses, web server, Canva): $315.58
  • physical branding/information (posters,flyers and business cards): $108
  • groceries (tasting samples and example slave-free groceries for events): $73.17
  • donations (supporting the Outlaw Ocean project): $50.99
  • carbon offsetting (more information below): $30.75
  • tax on interest: $11.49

Income

We entered 2024 with $4175.73 in the bank and weren’t initially expecting any significant expenses so did not solicit any donations until we took on our part-time research assistant in August.

Over the year we received $2364.25 as follows:

  • donations: $2255.50
  • interest: $108.75

Other support

Just Kai’s work is supported by the regular prayers of 67 individuals and families.

Carbon emissions

We see climate change as one of the drivers of the poverty that leads to child labour and vulnerability to slavery. For this reason we monitor our embedded carbon emissions in some detail, and seek to reduce them where we can (e.g. by the use of bicycles and public transport to get to events whenever possible). Using this tool, we estimate our 2024 carbon emissions to be 321.50kg CO2e. This comes from:

  • trestle table for events: 230.0 (NB the gazebo was bought second hand so we don’t consider it to have a carbon footprint)
  • groceries (table samples, tasting samples, food for team picnic): 69.4
  • printing: 5.4
  • transport: 16.7

Rather than buying carbon offsets as such, a donation of $30.75 was made to Trees Water People. This equates to an offset of roughly $50US per tonne. We chose to do this rather than buy offsets as such, as all their projects are chosen to directly benefit the people in the areas where they work, as well as absorbing carbon or preventing emissions.