EXPOSÉ: Who’s Making You Sweat - And Why?
A spotlight on the Burnett Foundation's upcoming 'fundraiser' that is much more than it appears
At Let Kids Be Kids we just received an email asking about the garish “Sweat With Pride” fundraiser currently being promoted around New Zealand. At the same time, I had just started to read a book. The timing was no coincidence…the book provided me with answers I wasn’t entirely prepared for - not because the information was new to me, but because seeing it all laid out, made something very clear, and I want to explain it to you.
This is not an accident. This is a plan. And you are paying for it
June is here. That means it’s apparently ‘pride’ month. And with it comes Sweat With Pride.
If you haven’t heard of it, Sweat With Pride is a month-long fitness fundraiser run by the Burnett Foundation Aotearoa - (formerly the New Zealand AIDS Foundation). The premise is simple: get your workplace to sign up as a team, do exercise during June, and raise money. Friendly. Healthy. Harmless.
Except it isn’t harmless. And once you understand what is actually being funded - and who is actually paying - you will never look at your workplace’s SWP team the same way again. We have known this for a while of course. Last June, LKBK teamed up with Lesbian Resistance and made two short videos to explain. Check them out here or below.
Let’s start with the money
The Burnett Foundation is not a struggling charity rattling a tin on a street corner. According to their own publicly filed financial statements, in the year ended 30 June 2025 they received:
$5,689,049 from Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand - your taxes
$111,793 from Pharmac - more of your taxes, in the form of donated condoms recorded as income
$786,202 raised through Sweat With Pride - from your workmates, your employer, and possibly you
Their total revenue was $8.24 million. They hold $4 million in accumulated reserves. They own property worth $2.35 million. In December 2025 they secured a new multi-year government contract running until June 2028.
They do not need your $50 donation. So why do they want it?
Their own annual report answers this directly. Funds raised through Sweat With Pride, they write, “help sustain and expand the services we provide beyond government funding - including counselling, access to at-home STI testing, community outreach, and advocacy for queer health equity.”
Read that again: beyond government funding. Sweat With Pride exists to fund the work the government contract won’t cover - specifically, the ideological advocacy and rainbow community expansion work that sits on top of the clinical HIV programme. That is not a wild claim. That is a direct quote from their annual report.
This is not a health campaign. It is a behaviour-change campaign
The Burnett Foundation’s annual report does not describe Sweat With Pride as a health promotion activity. It is a digital and marketing operation under a heading called “Behaviour-Change Marketing.” And they haven’t even changed the SWP graphics since last year.
Their stated goal is behaviour change - in the broadest sense. What behaviour do they want to change?
In FY2025 alone, their marketing generated 86.28 million ad impressions across Meta, Google, TikTok, Grindr (Gay Dating App), LinkedIn, and a pornographic advertising network called Traffic Junky. LinkedIn is a corporate workplace platform.
The inclusion of workplace-targeted advertising alongside adult content platforms in the same campaign architecture tells you everything you need to know about who the real audience is: not just gay men at risk of HIV.
Everyone. Including you. Including your employer. It might even include the school your child attends - because Schools is a named category on the SWP fundraising team dashboard, sitting alongside Workplaces and Friends/Whānau.
The playbook is at least 36 years old
The SWP inquiry via email came in just after I had paused to read a book that Rhonda Miller mentioned on our recent video. After the Ball, written in 1989 by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen - a neuropsychologist and a PR specialist - is described by its own authors as “a blueprint for change” and, frankly, as propaganda. It is a strategic manual for transforming mainstream public opinion on homosexuality, written by gay men who were remarkably candid about their intentions.
They described three phases:
Desensitisation - flood the media with gay content until people stop reacting;
Jamming - make anyone who objects feel ashamed, isolated, and socially punished; and
Conversion - attach gay identity to trusted, admired figures and institutions until people’s feelings change, whether they want them to or not.
Kirk and Madsen wrote in 1989: “To desensitise straights to gays and gayness, inundate them in a continuous flood of gay-related advertising, presented in the least offensive fashion possible. If straights can’t shut off the shower, they may at least eventually get used to being wet.”
Look at the SWP workplace leaderboard for 2026
On it you will find:
Palmerston North Police
Waka Kotahi NZTA - a Crown government agency
Vero Insurance
EY (Ernst & Young)
AA Insurance
2degrees
FMG.
Institutions and brands that ordinary New Zealanders trust, respect, and in some cases depend on. Their participation is not incidental.
It is the Conversion mechanism, operating exactly as designed - transferring the positive feelings you have for your bank, your insurer, your telco, and your police service onto an ideology you were never asked to endorse.
The Jamming mechanism is equally visible. I have many had people - quietly, privately - tell me that the pride and trans push in their workplaces is unbearable. That they feel they cannot speak. That they fear for their jobs. That is not a feeling that arose organically. It was engineered.
And if you think raising these questions makes me homophobic, I want you to read ‘After the Ball’ - because the authors predicted you would say exactly that, and they described it as the intended outcome. As Rhonda coins so well “I don’t accept your label”. Call me what you want. Your label says more about you than it does about me.
New Zealand is not special - it is actively participating in a global strategy, paid for by us
The Burnett Foundation does not operate in isolation. It sits within a global network of LGBTQ organisations connected to the United Nations system. Some of their counterparts are members of ILGA - the International Lesbian and Gay Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, which holds UN consultative status and uses it to:
Lobby governments via government funded LGBTQ charities
Monitor legislation relating to their human rights activism - country by country, and
Push policy through parliament and government agencies via UN Conventions that our government has adopted as a UN member state.
The Burnett Foundation isn’t an ILGA member (‘Sweat with Pride’ partners InsideOut and RainbowYouth are, as seen in the YouTube videos above), rather it draws its UN blueprint from UNAIDS. ILGA and UNAIDS push their ‘behaviour change’ operations onto entire populations like two wings of the same bird. Only, it’s more like an 8-armed octopus than a two-winged bird. And we funded it.
The global trans activist network
I just published a video with Rhonda Miller from Texas - The Global Trans Activist Network - which maps important threads in this network. Understanding the global architecture makes what is happening locally - including Sweat With Pride - make complete sense - if not wholly disturbing that it continues unchecked.
The Burnett Foundation’s own Trust Deed, signed in 2023, embeds this global architecture directly into its legal foundation - committing the organisation to the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (a WHO declaration) and the GIPA Principle established by UNAIDS at the 1994 Paris AIDS Summit.
These UN charters and principals are NOT BINDING INTERNATIONAL LAWS. New Zealand’s Parliament never voted on them. But they are now the governing principles of an organisation receiving $5.7 million a year of health department money that we all would agree would be better used elsewhere.
What this means for your family
If you’re working, paying a mortgage, school fees, insurance, rates, a phone bill - you may be supporting this campaign - through taxpayer dollars you are funding the Burnett Foundation. Not by choice. Not with your consent. Through every institutional channel that has been quietly captured over the past three decades by a strategy written down in a book in 1989.
Your child’s school may be on a SWP fundraising leaderboard (thankfully there aren’t many). Your workplace may have a team participating. Your insurer, your bank, and the government agency that manages your roads all have active participation. You may have friends or family participating in the event. They may even have asked you for money to help them fundraise.
If you feel uncomfortable about any of this - if you would rather your child wasn’t exposed to this, if you cringe when your workplace participates, if you feel silenced for fear of rupturing a friendship, if you think this has nothing to do with HIV prevention - you have been made to feel that saying so out loud would cost you something.
That is the Jamming. You’re being jammed strategically.
What you can do
I have long since stopped expecting people to be brave in public. I am merely asking you to be informed - and then decide for yourself what to do with that information.
If you work somewhere that participates in Sweat With Pride and you have a story about workplace pressure, real or implied - I want to hear from you. Confidentially.
Stay in touch as we continue to follow the money into the government agencies and organisations that fund this - follow me on your preferred channel, and Let Kids Be Kids on our socials and subscribe here on Substack.
And if you want to be part of a growing network of parents, grandparents, and ordinary New Zealanders who are done being silent - join us.
You are not alone.
You are not extreme.
You are the majority.
Our children’s innocence is worth protecting. And the truth, once it is known, cannot be unknown.
About Penny Marie
Penny Marie is a New Zealand-based investigative reporter, and founder of Let Kids Be Kids. Please follow, comment, share and support my work. Subscribe to my Substack, X (I also post these articles on X) and YouTube - and turn notifications on.
My previous article:
 | A guest post by
|
Just gross. I still have the list of the top 20 offensive childrens books in libraries, any recent additions I should be looking for. This article has made me want to free up some time especially for another visit.l
The Burnett Foundation sounds very "proper", formerly the AIDS foundation. It appears to me to be a cesspit of morally degeneracy. Try searching for "kink" in their search bar. They removed the worst of it after the Benjamin Doyle (Green MP) affair.