Carey Church has won the Mindful Money Best Ethical Financial Adviser award for 2026, and we are proud of that. This is work we care about deeply, and recognition from Mindful Money, whose whole purpose is to hold the industry to account on this, means something real to us.
Until last year, the award was given to a business rather than an individual. When it changed to an individual award, Rodger Spiller and Carey were named co-winners, which was significant. Rodger has been working in responsible and ethical investing since the mid-1990s and is genuinely one of the people who built the foundations of this field in New Zealand. Being placed alongside him in the first year the award recognised individuals meant a great deal.
Winning in her own right this year matters, but what is honestly most pleasing is that Melaney Clark and Melissa Allen are finalists. For most of the time this award has existed, it has recognised a very small circle of people. Seeing that circle widen is more important than the result itself, because the whole point is that responsible investing should not depend on a handful of practitioners keeping the flame alive.
A lot of our energy over the past year has gone into broadening adviser engagement with responsible investing. The Responsible Investment Association Australasia (RIAA) has run a financial adviser stream at its annual conference for some time, but the content has not always been as directly useful to working advisers as it could be. Carey has been involved in reshaping that this year, and the sessions put together will give advisers something they can actually use with clients, not just a set of ideas to absorb and file away.
We want to keep pushing on this because the goal is not for responsible investing to be a specialty you seek out from a small number of firms. It should be part of how any good financial adviser thinks about the companies their clients own. We have believed that at Moneyworks for decades, and so have many of the fund managers we work with. The question of whether companies take care of their people and their environment has always been part of how we evaluate what belongs in a portfolio.
We are financial planners who do this as part of our work, not a specialist ethical investing firm. That distinction matters. It means that for our clients, the conversation about values is woven into the financial planning conversation rather than being something you have to ask for separately or seek out from a different kind of provider altogether.
We keep building on what we have. Our research is stronger than it was, our client offering has developed considerably, and there is always more to do. Thank you to Mindful Money for this recognition, and to our clients who trust us with their financial lives.
