The Outgames, when delivered at optimum level, are an impressive and wide-ranging affair. Though the core is a multi-sport festival with some seriously competitive elements, it also includes cultural and human rights components.

The Wellington Outgames four years ago was a remarkable opportunity for glbti people from the Asia-Pacific region to come together in their thousands. The Wellington Town Hall formed the heart of the event, hosting registration and admin, ballroom dancing and an extensive and varied glbti human rights programme. Sporting competitions were located throughout the greater Wellington City, with netball in Porirua, swimming and diving at Kilbirnie, ten-pin bowling in Petone, mountain biking around Mt Victoria and a host of other sporting disciplines.

Competitors and delegates came from throughout the region, particularly Australia and New Zealand but also from India and Nepal, Asia, and the Melanesian and Polynesian nations. Just as the games prepared to open the Fukushima earthquake hit Japan so Japanese delegates were unable to attend.

The impressively-organised and conducted Wellington event was colourful, exciting, friendly, competitive, serious, supportive, and a joy to be involved in, thanks to the hard work and commitment of a core managament group, individual event organisers and a whole heap of volunteers.

Overseeing the successive Asia-Pacific region Outgames, which are a subset of Outgames held in a number of regions around the world, is the Gay and Lesbian International Sports Association-Asia/Pacific, GLISA-AP for short, or GLISA for even shorter.

GLISA is made up of people from throughout the region including New Zealand. Its job to facilitate the running of the Outgames by conferring a license on organisations which it believes have the capability to pull it all together every two years.

Damien Strogen

Damien Strogen is the President of Team Auckland Master's Swimmers, and says the opportunity for Auckland to host the 2016 games came during poolside chats with then GLISA-AP President Barry Taylor between races at the Darwin Outgames, which followed the Wellington games.

He went away and investigated the possibility with a team of locals, and found the community was willing and the facilities were ready.

Their bid was successful and a license agreement was signed with GLISA Asia Pacific last September.

The structure was to be a board which oversaw an executive team which in turn would coordinate the organisers of the many and various Auckland Outgames components. They anticipated a million-dollar budget and the biggest glbti event the country had ever seen.

Strogen feels the seeds of the project's demise may have been planted when those pulling the early stages together opted for that separate board and executive team structure. Separating governance from actual on the ground, or operational, work has not always been a recipe for success in a number of Auckland-based organisations in recent times.

"To be very honest, at the start GLISA advised us don't have a separate board. Keep it operational," Strogen says. "To keep the managing team as the people who are reporting to GLISA. As you know we've had issues with Pride. We wanted to get away from a small group of people being able to manage everything and make the wrong decisions. So we appointed a board. To our detriment."

The appeal for board members was made through lgbti media, for experienced people in areas such as communications and governance, people who wanted to give back to the community. There was an HR process, people were vetted, and the successful candidates were appointed. Those board members were Phylesha Brown-Acton, Martin King, Vinnie Sykes, Prue Tamatekapua and Kerry Underhill.

"Our expectation was that they would help us with funding, they would help us with counsel at a high level with government organisations, with human rights organisations," Strogen says of the board's role. "But also to ensure that the governance and the responses and the ownership by the executive was true, was fair and was legal. We've seen from other organisations how it can easily fall apart. I'm not sure that their expectations were ever really expressed ... but [at the start] they were very much involved, very much wanting to get things done, wanting to launch, wanting to make it a success."

The starter's pistol had been fired and Strogen says a lot of effort then went into talking to businesses with Rainbow Ticks, applying for funding from Auckland Council's events arm, ATEED, and central government. It was clearly a big ask and as the months went by there were indications of support, from Corporate and Auckland City sources, but nothing actually signed on the dotted line.

Strogen says the reality is that no matter what financial year an event is in, there will be limited rainbow sponsorship dollars available and any other major Auckland event will be in competition with the Auckland Pride Festival for funding. Indeed, the Outgames had been timed to run at the same time as the next Auckland Pride Festival, in the hope that the two events together would create a kind of 'super-event.'

Monthly Outgames board meetings were held, on alternate fortnights between executive team meetings. Strogen says he, as secretary, and one or two of the other executive members would attend the board meetings. Executive update reports were put to the board before the monthly meetings. There were also conversations between meetings and Strogen feels information was shared freely. He says it was standard stuff and they thought everything was being worked through. "Their questions, their concerns, were addressed, were responded back to."

Strogen last attended a board meeting in May, but another was held in June, after which he was told about the request for a deferral. "That came as quite a shock to me. And from then on we were trying to save the Auckland Outgames. I was working with GLISA and the executive to try and make it all work. The board essentially just distanced themselves completely, went quiet, wouldn't engage. Then they resigned."

"It had all got to a point where we were really ready to pursue things and they put a stop to it. And they put a stop to it in such a way that they told us it was all to be kept confidential, we weren't allowed to talk to anybody outside the executive about what was going on. Which really hamstrung us. We couldn't ethically go to sponsors and say 'Ok, we still want to pursue your sponsorship of $20,000', knowing full well that the board may defer or cancel the games."

Strogen says he met with the board one Thursday to discuss the options for the games to go ahead. "I did that, and they still didn't want to know. And thereafter there was no communication." The board's lead-up to resignation en masse was, he says, “all done behind closed doors."

Strogen says if the board had said in April, for example, "'look, if we don't get so many funding dollars by June, we'll have to look at deferring the games', we'd have gone full out. But deferral was never raised."

There had been some concerns raised in previous board meetings. “Concerns are always duly raised in meetings. Certain board members had also applied for funding but we never heard what had happened with those funding applications. But it was never stated at the meetings that 'this is a drop dead date... if we don't do it by then we're going to cancel or defer.' They just let it move on and on and on until it almost became too late.�

Had there been any discussion at all between the executive team and the board about re-tooling the concept, of creating a plan B? “Not until the very end, because if you have to re-vision then you have to start again.�

Without a board there wasn't any authority for the Outgames organisation to continue or make commitments although for a few weeks more Auckland Outgames 2016 Inc. still existed on paper.

Strogen sighs. “Looking back now, the signs were all there that the board members were quite disengaged. They were engaged at the meetings but not a great deal between meetings, apart from discussions about the human rights component with Phylesha. At the time perhaps we were so busy we didn't see it.�

“I think they didn't want to get their hands dirty, or get involved too much otherwise they would become liable for it. I don't know where they were coming from but they certainly weren't a responsible board in the way they operated.

He says the board also totally ignored GLISA-AP. GLISA arranged a facilitation weekend with the board and the executive, where the issues were to be hammered out. However, he says, the Board resigned the Friday before that weekend gathering.

He says the executive team tried to communicate, copying board members in on correspondence, "it didn't go anywhere, they went totally silent".

Finally, after much public prodding by GayNZ.com Daily News the board issued a statement, on August 13^th, saying it had believed it would have been "extremely difficult to deliver a quality event in February 2016 and that more time was needed for the Executive team to obtain sponsorship."

And they said they were "disappointed" that the GLISA AP board had not publicly clarified that they had sought a date deferral. "This was a clausal option of the license agreement that the Auckland Outgames 2016 Inc. and GLISA AP entered into."

They announced they were winding themselves up as a board.

A small team of mostly gay men tried to wrangle the Auckland Outgames project back into place but by now the cards were stacked against them and they had to admit defeat. The Auckland Outgames 2016 were off.

Tomorrow evening Damien Strogen will reflect further on this unfortunate turn of events, including matters such as liability. We continue to invite anyone from the resigned Outgames board to engage with us and to help us create a clearer picture of what transpired for the glbti communities.

It should also be noted that a completely new and more sports-focused replacement event, Proud to Play, has now been created to fill the gap left by the doomed Auckland Outgames.