Liz: I mean, there were a couple of things happening at the time in PRF. One was that Glyn had brought in Genevieve Timmons to do some work with PRF around partnerships with peers in philanthropy. And the other thing that was happening around that time was, I understand there was obviously a lot happening around the country in terms of drought. And then, of course, no one will forget 2019/20 in terms of bushfires, then COVID, then floods. So yeah. So my understanding of the beginning is that it was, it was around, I guess, both of those things, working with peers, and also ability of FRRR to be able to channel resources to those communities that are obviously often very much at the front line of these disasters.

Natalie: So, yeah, certainly the drought started to really bite in New South Wales and other parts of Australia. And had, you know, been pretty isolated to Queensland before that, and then, you know, we really got into those very dry times. And FRRR had a program that was sort of running and received a relatively major grant from the federal government and a lot of other philanthropy, started to think about what they could be doing to support those regions as well, and particularly foundations who had had a connection to rural Australia in some way. And our understanding is that Paul Ramsey, had had had a pretty strong connection in the Southern Highlands region, and there was a sort of care for the country from that perspective as well.

In thinking about collaborations that you’ve been involved in, or the PRF is or has been involved in, where would you where would you say that the complementary strengths are? And you know what’s make, what makes the collaboration with PRF and FRRR for all acronyms together to work so well.

Liz: Look, I think there’s obviously big complementary strengths around our purpose, which is always a good a good starting point, and we want to see people and places thrive around Australia, and we’re really mindful of those places that experience the greatest impacts of, you know, all forms of disadvantage, obviously, in terms of rural and regional Australia, that’s often where the the impact of these disasters is most intensely felt. I think we would come from a similar kind of mindset in how we see those places, not places to be saved by outsiders, but places to hopefully from our perspective, try, what can we bring, in terms of resources, in terms of influence, what are the things that we can bring that will enable those places to, or help enable those places to, you know, use the strengths that they they clearly have, and demonstrate, I think we saw FRRR, and would see FRRR as having that deep understanding, you know, that understanding of rural and regional and remote communities and strong connection to those places being located in a regional area. Yeah. So just that deep knowledge, like a lot of a lot of our funding, until more recent times, has been a lot on the Eastern Seaboard, for example. So you know, often we we need to partner with people who know other places better than, better than we do. I think, I think the other thing is that we would both, I would say, share a view that we want to be listening to people in communities about what it is that matters to them, what they want to do about it and how can we back them.

Natalie: I’d be interested in your reflections on, you know, how our respective goals and objectives have evolved with the partnership, and how you know what your observations of that have been, yeah. Got any thoughts?

Liz: So I suppose, in terms of PRF’s strategy and again, this is not that dissimilar, in some ways, a future where people and places have what they need to thrive. But I guess a big thing that has shifted when we talked about the beginning of the relationship is PRF was doing a lot more of that kind of disaster relief funding at the time when this relationship started. Now, we would hold a view that if we’re going to work with alongside people and places, to shift the kind of conditions that lead to disadvantage, we want to have a more long-term approach. We want to have we want to work with people and places in terms of, how can we help build their resilience for a long term, And I think the the power of a small grant to catalyse things that we we might not be able to even anticipate, is really interesting, yeah, really working with communities to re-imagine different future scenarios and fund things that are about developing new capabilities and new insights is, yeah, it’s full of potential learning and potential innovation.Liz:

And I think even just that recognition that so often, as you know, well, after a disaster, that’s when all the money flows is well, like people give in response to disasters,  but they don’t often give to think about a long-term, yeah, capability building or capacity building?

Natalie: Yeah, that’s right, and I think the data would still say that most disaster giving is still in that response phase. There’s increasing advocacy and evidence, you know, to shift that balance towards more preparedness and resilience.

PRF has a lot of impactful partnerships and probably a growing portfolio by the year as PRF embeds its strategy. What did you look for in the not-for-profits that you partner with and what does success look like?

Liz: The obvious one, that’s one that we started talking about in this relationship, is, is shared purpose. So focused on purpose. We also, though, definitely look for not-for-profits, and any partners, partners like FRRR that know how to and are good at collaborating, and ideally, people who can collaborate across sectors as well. So that’s increasingly a focus for PRF is, yeah, how do we work with government at all levels? How do we work with peers? How do we work with partners, with communities? One of our excellent board members says all the time, you know, so what difference will this make for a real person somewhere? So I think, I think especially when you’re in the space of trying to think about system shifting and conditions and everything, it’s still trying to always draw that link between you, trying to make this you know, you want to focus on and try to influence macro conditions, and you want to make sure that the stuff that you’re doing and talking about and involved in is actually making a difference for a real person somewhere. As someone who’s come from the community sector and has often applied, you know, sought funding for things the number of times in the days when I was doing that, where I felt like you’ve got to come up with something that’s innovative, sustainable, creative, you can do it in six months, you can’t pay any staff, you can’t pay any overheads, DELIVER! You know, it’s like, if we’re not using that money in a way that it might change the way say government funding flows into communities, then it’s still a drop in the ocean relative to the the level of funding that governments pour into communities, the way it flows, as we often know, is not necessarily the most effective way. Is not the way that the community has a has a has a solid enough say over how resources might flow differently within that community. I would rather that we’re starting a conversation with people who have an ability to change some policy levers or funding levers at the beginning of that, you know, ideally not six months long, but you know, ideally at the beginning of that sort of initiative or set of initiatives, so that there’s a chance that they might be prepared to go on the journey of like, what can we learn about this, and how could we potentially back this in somewhere else? So I think understanding what what role we can play as philanthropy, which is sometimes we can back in things that government can’t, as you know, easily back in but maybe they can five or 10 years down the track, if we’ve been able to, if we’ve been able to prove something up, but not, not on a fantasy of like one day, government will just adopt this.

Natalie: FRRR is 25 this year, so we’re thinking about what the future for rural, regional, remote Australia should look like, what the future aspirations might be in, say, 2050, you know, what would, what would good look like? What would better look like? What would a thriving regional Australia look like, and what’s it going to take to get us there? So I’d be really curious to hear about from PRF’s perspective. You know, what would a thriving rural, regional, remote Australia look like in 2050?

Liz: Places and communities are connected and leading and imagining their futures. You’ve gotta connect with people in order to be able to lead and imagine different futures. And you’ve gotta be able to connect across the differences that we were talking about, the different paradigms, the different perspectives, the different backgrounds, all of that stuff I think you do need. Yeah, so I would, I would love to see more communities thriving, because they’ve been able to, in a way, maybe rediscover some of that connection and some of that imagination about the future. And I think it’s we really need at the moment, because I think there’s a lot that is that people are understanding, understandably feeling pretty overwhelmed by terms of the direction of what’s happening in the climate, what’s happening in global politics, all of those things, but, but I think there are stories where there’s and hopefully through something like the Climate Solutions grants, you know, there will be amazing stories of things that people are doing, great ideas, great creativity, great collaboration, great possibility, getting shared, getting learnt from, and yeah, that we, that the broader Australian society can see this is what’s possible.

Natalie: For many communities, just being seen and heard is really important, because they can feel like they’re not seen and heard and they don’t matter a lot of the time. And in regional Australia, there’s a lot of lot of stuff contributing to the broader country and nation that can can be a bit invisible, unless it’s a crisis. And then, yeah, that’s so yeah, I completely agree with what you described and I think the word hope is really important, yeah, really important. Yeah. Well, I would just close by saying it’s really brilliant to work with PRF and the team, and it is a partnership that’s evolved over time, and it’s been, it will continue to evolve, which good partnerships should. But yeah, the comments you made about, you know, the sort of some of the shared perspective and starting place about what we think the world needs is really important. And, yeah,I think we can continue to contribute with our respective strengths, and, you know, bring collaboration to communities, and you know, hopefully to continue to demonstrate what good collaboration can look like.

Positive impact of place-based capacity-building pilot program in rural NSW

The significant impacts and lessons of a five-year pilot program aimed at building collective not-for-profit (NFP) sector capability in small rural and regional communities have been revealed in a report recently released by FRRR.

Leeton, Junee and Nambucca Valley NFPs participated in the Investing in Rural Community Futures (IRCF) pilot, a partnership between FRRR and the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation (VFFF), which committed $5 million over five years across the three local government areas, with $1 million in funding available to support each of the three pilot communities.

The IRCF program set out to develop and trial a collaborative model that would work to strengthen local NFPs, so they could better service their communities. Through this co-designed, multi-year program, each community came together to learn, identify strengths and common challenges and then work collaboratively to lift up each organisation for the benefit of broader community.

On-the-ground support from a local facilitator was coupled with a rigorous, regular ‘roadmapping’ process through which local NFPs agreed on gaps and opportunities and prioritised activities. Grants and flexible funding were then available to enable agreed priorities to be actioned.

Running alongside the entire program was an evaluation program, delivered in partnership with Matrix on Board. In November 2024, this robust evaluation process was announced as the winner of the 2024 Social Impact Measurement Network Australia (SIMNA) Awards.

Through this evaluation program, FRRR identified several factors as critical to successful place-based NFP capacity building, including:

• Investing in people and leadership capability enables fundamental improvements in governance, processes, equipment and systems;
• Face-to-face support and engagement is essential;
• A collaborative approach focusses community and guides funding;
• NFP organisations need to be ready, willing and able to participate actively to extract full value and optimise the investment required to make place-based change; and
• Building trust and changing habits takes time – a five-year commitment was needed and elevated thinking from immediate needs to strategic capability.

Natalie Egleton, FRRR CEO said the ultimate goal of the program was to help organisations “fit their oxygen masks first”, so they could maintain their critical community work well into the future.

“As we walked alongside these organisations, we saw them grow in confidence, as well as develop strategic partnerships and networks that have led to advocacy efforts to advance local and systemic issues,” Ms Egleton said.

“The evaluation we’ve undertaken confirms that IRCF has been a significant contributing factor to the growing impact of these organisations and the vitality of these communities. Early work indicates that the $5 million investment has leveraged a further $8.7 million across the three communities.

“We have learned that providing flexible support and funding targeted at the capacity and capability of NFPs leads to more collaborative and resilient organisations. We also confirmed that change in not linear, takes time, and is the work of many working together on common goals.

“Or, to put it another way, time, trust and tenacity are essential to a thriving community-led, not-for-profit sector in local communities.

“None of this would have been possible without the willingness of VFFF to work with us – to take a leap of faith on this pilot and to engage with us, and with community groups directly, over the last five years,” Ms Egleton said.

Following its success as a model, the IRCF program has extended to numerous other regions across rural New South Wales and is about to launch in three further communities in Victoria. Click here to read more about the impact of the pilot program.

FRRR and Paul Ramsay Foundation (PRF) are pleased to announce a multi-year partnership to support Community Led Climate Solutions in remote, rural and regional communities experiencing disadvantage across Australia.

This support aims to address disadvantage, reduce the risks and impacts of climate change on community lives and livelihoods and enable community-led solutions. Funding will be distributed through FRRR’s Community Led Climate Solutions grant program.

Natalie Egleton, FRRR’s CEO, said that with rural communities disproportionately impacted by the impacts of climate change, it is vital that there is flexible funding to seed and strengthen the activities of not-for-profit organisations leading change in their communities.

“We know remote, rural and regional communities are already feeling the impacts of a changing climate and many are ready to respond – but what that looks like in their community will differ depending on their context. The support of Paul Ramsay Foundation is important to back the initiatives of locals who will act on climate solutions and make a difference in their community.

 “With Paul Ramsay Foundation’s support, combined with generous support of organisations such as Boundless Earth and Hand Heart Pocket Foundation, we are looking forward to continuing to provide this valuable support annually through a dedicated grants and support program.”

Liz Yeo, Chief Alliances Officer at Paul Ramsay Foundation, said, “At PRF, we recognise that communities themselves bring great strengths and ideas about how best to tackle the challenges they face. We’re pleased to be joining with FRRR to support remote, rural and regional communities to develop local solutions to the impact of climate change and socioeconomic disadvantage.”

Round 2 of Community Led Climate Solutions will open mid-July 2024. Subscribe to FRRR’s eNews to receive a monthly update about the grants and opportunities on offer.

Tell us a little bit about the Ian Rollo Currie Estate Foundation. Who was Mr Currie and why his specific interest in supporting ageing Victorians?

That’s an interesting question because back in 2014, we had a system whereby we would either give grants of $50,000 to various organisations, or give what we call pledges, which were larger amounts to help with buildings of predominantly aged care facilities. We called for applications every year and in 2014 we got an application from FRRR. We looked at it and thought, well, FRRR is really just doing the same thing that we’re doing. Catriona Fay from Perpetual suggested we might want to consider this more closely because FRRR has got a lot of expertise.

When we investigated further, we thought, well, in terms of getting the maximum benefit from our donation, FRRR is well trusted in the regions and they’ve got their own grant processes and they spend a lot more time than we do going through it in a rigorous way.

So when we got the acquittal back from FRRR and we saw the range of the funded projects, we felt they were getting a lot of applications and covering a lot wider range then we were able to because we were really relying on applicant organisations to get involved with our grants program.

So that’s been the primary reason why we have backed FRRR and continued with our funding; because of the quality of the projects they fund and the fact that we can get a breadth of projects and geographical spread.

I should reflect and say that Mr Currie’s will says the Foundation should provide relief to aged persons in necessitous circumstances in Victoria. However because of his interest in Euroa, we have a particularly soft spot for supporting regional areas. We have given money to metropolitan areas and organisations, but we’ve always had an emphasis on regional Victoria.

What other sort of grants does the Foundation make each year to meet these charitable objectives?

We used to give grants of up to $50,000 to a whole lot of projects and pledges of $100,000 and above to aged care facilities, but we thought we were spreading ourselves too thinly and we weren’t getting the impact we needed. So we decided to give larger amounts of money to small organisations, and we also gave multi-year money to the Stroke Foundation and the Heart Foundation for research into heart and stroke issues specifically for older people.

About five years ago we tried to rationalise the program after I attended an event put on by Perpetual about strategic philanthropy with Paul Brest, former President of the Hewlett Foundation. His presentation made us really try to identify ‘what are the critical issues for the elderly and necessitous circumstances’ because that’s where we should direct our funding. So we did some research, and involved FRRR, and concluded that what were necessitous circumstances back in Mr Currie’s day would have been mainly financial. But as society’s got wealthier and we’ve grown older, there are other issues that have come to play; the obvious ones related to health and dementia. But we also we did some research and identified the one of the key issues is homelessness, specifically focused in regional areas for elderly people.

We have developed a joint venture with Housing for the Aged Action Group (HAAG) and, through further research, identified the Murray Goulburn, Hume and Mitchell Shires as the best areas to commence our venture. We established a pilot project for elderly people experiencing homelessness just before COVID kicked in, which of course slowed things down. Then we had trouble recruiting people and there were the bad floods in that area, so it’s been a bit of a stop-start, but last year we finished the pilot and we have really started to get some good traction.

The vision is to roll it out all over Victoria, but like all these things, we’ve just got to do it gradually. This is a big area of emphasis for the Foundation now and it has sort of become our flagship program. We feel like we’re on the strategic philanthropy journey now with our partnership with HAAG and support for FRRR with its expertise in regional areas.

What do you say are the strengths of FRRR on that basis?

One of the things that came through in our research and FRRR reinforces this, is that you don’t just go into regions, hang up your shingle and say here we are, we’re here to help you, come in. You’ve got to embed yourself in the community to be successful. You’ve got to understand the issues and get the trust of the community and you’ve really got to get into the grassroots of communities.

FRRR is really embedded in rural communities, they understand their communities and are well-trusted. That’s one of the big learnings I’ve got from dealing with FRRR – their understanding of and their emphasis on getting into communities with a sort of a bottom-up type approach, rather than a top down.

Can you think of any particular grants through FRRR that are noteworthy in your mind or are particular favourites?

I don’t think it’s any one thing. What jumps out at me is just the variety and range of the projects that FRRR funds and the geographic spread. I was going through the acquittals the other day and there is the cycling program for older people in Portland, grants to St Arnaud Neighbourhood House, Anam Cara House Colac, Central Highlands Rural Health, Avenel Active. Projects like life stories, training palliative care volunteers, capital funds for specialised beds in nursing homes, digital literacy skills; such a wide range of grant projects and this reinforces our initial judgement about getting involved with FRRR and how our relationship has progressed.

How do you see the future of the partnership with FRRR?

The challenge is that we’ve got to be very specific under the terms that we have to follow, and therefore the Foundation’s support has to be for the elderly in Victoria. So we’ve got to be quite disciplined in where we give the money under the terms of the will.

My observation is that older people, particularly in regional areas, are not good at beating their own drum and coming up with projects that need funding. Older regional people, by their nature, are probably pretty independent and sort of don’t necessarily want to be seen as being the recipients of philanthropy.

The challenge for the Foundation is to maintain and to sort of ‘smoke out’ the opportunities for funding. That’s where FRRR comes in and can achieve this well.

We have similar issues around homelessness. People don’t like to admit they’re homeless, but there are a lot of people experiencing housing instability, and you’ve really got to work hard to identify where it is occurring and how to help.

By Jillian Kirwan-Lee, Head of Partnerships

While it’s always good practice to thank your partners, it is usually done privately – in letters or acquittal reports, in phone calls and emails or in face-to-face meetings – and occasionally, at an event or in media releases launching a new program. And rightly so.

But we want to take this opportunity to publicly give a shout-out to the Origin Energy Foundation. While there are other organisations that we have worked with for much longer – and to whom we are equally grateful – in the case of the Origin Energy Foundation we have worked with them in multiple ways – not just in a funder / grantee relationship.

This is a great example of the value of funders and grantees building trusting relationships, which support open and transparent conversations, as called for in the Paying What It Takes report.

The Origin Energy Foundation first partnered with FRRR in 2013 on our Back to School program. This initiative, now in its final year as a stand-alone program for FRRR, saw us provide $50 vouchers through a network of community foundations and community-based delivery partners to ease the financial burden on families at the start of the school year, ensuring that children in need had the basics required to start the year with the best possible chance of being engaged in their education. 

It’s a program that has had a significant impact, enhancing access to education for thousands of students and in the process, helping to build stronger, more vibrant and sustainable remote, rural and regional communities. As one recipient family put it, “My daughter is no longer embarrassed to go to school now that she has a new uniform and is no longer made fun of.” It’s hard to believe that $50 vouchers can do that – but they can, especially when additional support is wrapped around it.

We’ve experienced something similar with the Origin Energy Foundation. While they provided multi-year funding to the program for over a decade, supporting more than 20,000 families along the way, the Foundation has provided FRRR with so much more.

They advocated for us, introducing us to other organisations that could come on board as partners and writing about the importance of supporting education in remote areas in articles in mainstream media. Their staff supported the program, with matched donations through workplace giving and they shared impact stories through their employee communication channels. They helped us promote the program and its impact externally too, gifting us space in The Big Issue magazine, as well as paying for a trusted videography partner to work with us to develop two campaigns to help with additional fundraising. And when crises hit, like the Black Summer Bushfires, they contributed to an additional round of the Back to School program for students in affected communities to ensure children’s education didn’t suffer.

But perhaps most importantly, they put their trust in FRRR and provided flexible funding to direct the donations where they made the most difference, believing that we knew how best to support those that we work with.

Such collaboration and care are rare, with the philanthropic sector often directing support towards those areas that are meaningful to the funder, rather than what is needed by the community.

We take that locally-driven yet holistic approach in our own granting, as do the groups that we partner with on the ground. For example, as one of our community partners put it, “The vouchers allow us to keep an eye on the disadvantaged students and provide additional wellbeing support. Our students that receive support often do not display overt behaviours that would indicate the level of financial distress in the home. Each connection made through the vouchers allows the family to open up and share their stories, which at times has allowed us to connect them to other services in the community. Picking up the vouchers from the front office means we can connect with families that often don’t come into the school or are reluctant to meet with us.” Like the Origin Energy Foundation, we trust them to get the support where it’s most needed.

While FRRR will no longer be running the Back to School program, several Community Foundations will take it forward, customising it to meet the needs of their local community. We will have an ongoing role in building capacity of those groups, as we transition the program to local management.

Instead, FRRR will redirect our educational investment through small grants, which we know offers more flexibility to local groups to support their community in the most appropriate way.

So, while this current phase of our partnership with Origin Energy Foundation is coming to a close, we remain connected as we strive for better educational outcomes for young people living in remote, rural and regional Australia.

In the meantime, our deep thanks and appreciation to Origin Energy Foundation, for taking a flexible, generous and trusting approach for all you do for young Australians in need.

FRRR and Charter Hall are pleased to announce the expansion of their partnership, signing a three-year agreement to drive further investment in disaster preparedness and recovery efforts across remote, rural and regional communities. The funding will be distributed through FRRR’s flagship Strengthening Rural Communities small grants program.

Natalie Egleton, FRRR’s CEO, said that with rural communities increasingly at the forefront of the impacts of climate change, it’s more important than ever that communities can access flexible funding to support preparedness efforts, especially in smaller remote, rural and regional communities.

“We’re grateful for this commitment from Charter Hall, as it means that there will be more funding to empower local communities to shape and lead their preparedness, disaster recovery and resilience building projects in a way that makes the most sense in their community.

“After decades of working alongside remote, rural and regional communities, we know that no two are the same. Our small grants program has proven a critical source of funding, as it’s always open and ready when the time is right. For some, it’s helped them purchase emergency equipment or upgrade the place of last refuge so it’s safe, accessible and fit for purpose; for others, it’s supported a whole of community planning process, while for others it’s enabled leadership and local capacity development.

“With Charter Hall’s support, we will be able to support more communities be better able to respond to whatever comes their way. We also look forward to sharing the importance of this kind of support among their networks and colleagues,” Ms Egleton said.

Natalie Devlin, Charter Hall’s Chief Experience Officer, commented on the importance of its partnership with FRRR in having an enduring impact on its communities.

“At Charter Hall we have always focused on actively partnering for mutual success. Our approach to community investment is no different, focusing on creating lasting change by partnering where we can make the most difference to individuals and communities. We are pleased to be expanding our partnership with FRRR, ensuring relief and recovery solutions are funded in the community to deliver the greatest community benefit.

“Through this partnership, we will enable local people and organisations to shape and lead their disaster relief, recovery and resilience building processes. Having worked with FRRR since 2020, we have seen first-hand the difference they can make through their local understanding, and connection to grassroots organisations that often can’t access support otherwise.”

The first grants to be made with Charter Hall’s support was announced 30 April 2024.

Rural community groups and not-for-profit organisations that want to apply to the Prepare & Recover stream can find out more on FRRR’s website.

The list of Charter Hall-funded grant recipients and their projects are below.

The Foundation for Rural & Regional Renewal (FRRR) has made changes to two other roles in the Leadership Team.

In response to increased focus on climate change and in particular energy transition in remote, rural and regional communities, FRRR has created a new role on the Leadership Team to focus on climate solutions.

Former FRRR General Manager of Partnership and Philanthropy, Sarah Matthee, has been appointed Climate Solutions Portfolio Lead. In this role, she will work with funders and community groups to better respond to changing climate impacts and drive local solutions that reduce emissions through education, engagement and action.

Natalie says that while FRRR has always worked in this area, the increasing prominence of these issues prompted the organisation to separate Climate Solutions from the Disaster Resilience and Recovery portfolio.

“Sarah is personally passionate about this space and, having been with FRRR for the last six years leading our Partnerships and Services team, she knows the key stakeholders well and has hit the ground running.

“I am also delighted to announce that we’ve appointed Jillian Kirwan Lee as Head of Partnerships. Jillian joined us in 2022, working alongside Sarah, and brings great experience in strategic partnership development and relationship management.

“I’m delighted to have her join the Leadership Team, helping grow our network of supporters to achieve our goal of granting out $30 million per year to support the remote, rural and regional communities that are at the heart of Australia’s prosperity,” Natalie explained.

When the bushfires hit in Victoria, trustees really wanted to help the communities and to make a difference. But we understood that an immediate grant may not be the best response, and that communities, while they were dealing with the immediate trauma of the fires might not be best placed to understand their future path. And so through FRRR and with the Sidney Myer Fund, we held hands, and we navigated to the Bushfire Recovery Fund, which is about enabling FRRR to work deeply with bushfire affected communities to understand their needs, and their readiness to receive funds to create a better future for those communities.

What does the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust and co-funder the Sidney Myer Fund see as the strengths of the partnership?

Some of the highlights of the Bushfire Recovery Fund and working so closely with FRRR and the Sidney Myer Fund on this project has been understanding community voices through FRRR and from the community directly.

FRRR plays an amazing role – really working deeply with communities to understand needs, and I credit them with the work that they do on the ground with communities to help them navigate – often complex – granting regimes that we impose as funders, and to understand how we can practically make a difference.

We’ve had the opportunity at Helen Macpherson Smith Trust to meet some of those fantastic community members along the way. We’ve traveled to Mallacoota and met the community health team there we traveled to Sarsfield out of Bairnsdale to see and meet with the community organisation there. And those people are changing their communities – they’re the coalface and they’re making lives better for their community members, and it’s so inspiring to see them. We couldn’t do that without the support of FRRR and without FRRR working on the ground. So we’re really grateful. That’s been absolutely a program highlight for me.

We’re a really tiny team at Helen Macpherson Smith Trust and we’re based in Melbourne. So one of the great things about FRRR is that there’s people on the ground in rural and regional communities – not just around Victoria but around Australia, and we really see the benefit of that. We feel we can get scale across Victoria through partners like FRRR because of the really deep work that’s happening on the ground. I think that’s one of the rich and wonderful things about FRRR.

Through our education focus area we’re funding some really fantastic place-based organisations. We’re funding the Mornington Peninsula Foundation for the education work they’re doing. We’re funding Tomorrow Today Foundation, which is a community foundation in Benalla, again, we’re seeing education outcomes through that project. And we’re also supporting Ganbina in Shepparton – a place-based education project working with Indigenous partners in Shepparton and the region.

Do you have any advice for any philanthropic organisations or other individuals, when choosing who to partner with?

I think the most important thing, when looking at partners to support is the relationships. And we’ve really got a strong relationship with FRRR. We have a long standing relationship with FRRR, and we’re really seeing the benefits of that, and holding hands on the journey, and learning as we go. I see FRRR absolutely as a partner in this – not as a grantor -grantee relationship. We are partners, and I think we’ve really achieved a lot through this project.

Tell us a little bit about Hand Heart Pocket, its background and how you have designed your giving strategy.

Our purpose is stated as we partner for change for people in need in Queensland and Papua New Guinea. We put that purpose together with lots of thought around the fact that we partner, which means we don’t build things, and we don’t necessarily deliver ourselves, we find great organisations, and great leaders doing things that are very impactful, and we focus on people in need. Our strategic partnerships are focused on young people in need in Queensland, and then we do a range of other things where we support the community more generally, and we also support the members of the Freemasons of Queensland, in their community activity at a local level.

The Freemasons and Hand Heart Pocket have always been involved in responses to disasters when disaster strikes, and also been a very regionally spread organisation. There are lodges of the Freemasons of Queensland right across the state – there’s about 200. They’re very connected to their local communities. Queensland is the most regionalised of the states – there’s more people living outside of the capital cities in Queensland than any other states. And we really understand the importance of the vibrancy and the sustainability of those communities, for the people who love to live in a more rural setting with more space. It’s really important that we remember that sometimes it’s more difficult to live there. It’s more expensive, the services don’t necessarily reach all the places in Queensland where people love to live. So it’s a combination of where our members are and the heritage of the organisation and also understanding that to sustain healthy and vibrant communities in Queensland. We have to remember that a huge portion of Queenslanders don’t live in the capital city.

Tell us about Hand Heart Pocket’s interest in supporting communities recovering from a preparing for disasters, and also in driving climate solutions?

The board is very forward looking and future focused. And so we understand that an investment in our young people is the best investment that we can make, and that the future that they’re facing is changing quickly. There’s lots of strategic level risks that the community is facing and it could really derail a lot of things about the way that we live our lives and a lot of things that we enjoy. We’ve done some really good risk analysis in our strategy process to understand what climate change will mean, for our organisation and for our members and the local communities. Really, climate change is probably the number one risk. So it, it poses risks to our members and to their communities but it also poses a risk to our organisation from the point of view of what it might do to the assets that we invest in through our investment portfolio and what it might do to in terms of shocks to financial markets, what it might mean for us to have investments that might become stranded assets. So that’s a big part of how we think about it.

And then also, what the possible negative impacts of climate change are on local communities – what it will do to food security, to people’s health, future pandemics, also what it’s going to mean for industries in Queensland. It will have negative impacts on tourism, it will have negative impacts on the Great Barrier Reef. And so there’s lots of communities in Queensland that are facing into very uncertain future.

As a philanthropic foundation, we don’t think about it just in terms of what we give, although it’s embedded into our strategy throughout our relationship with FRRR, but it’s also embedded into our strategy in terms of the way that we invest as well. And we have a responsible investment policy that has an exclusion for new fossil fuels and expansion of fossil fuels. We also have a real focus on investing our money in a way that drives a positive transition, and a sustainable future.

In our giving, we’ve had a historical ability to respond in times of disaster to support communities in Queensland when disaster does strike. We still do that, but we also have a way of giving through FRRR that allows us to invest into what I would call climate adaptation, which is preparation for possible natural disasters and natural hazards like cyclones and floods and fires at a grassroots level. The relationship with FRRR has allowed us to provide a large lump sum of money that FRRR administers and distributes as smaller grants to local grassroots community organisations who are working on all sorts of projects around resilience building in their local community.

We’ve also provided a second round of funding to FRRR to do an additional grant round of small grants that are focused not just on adapting to a potential different future threat from climate change, but also positive action by local communities, to reduce their carbon emissions, and actually mitigate the effects of climate change by changing up their activities in ways that are going to better protect the environment or reduce the carbon emissions. So our response to climate is I suppose weaved through lots of different in different ways through our strategy and the way that we work. And it’s about being future focused, it’s about being really understanding those big system level risks that our community faces. We try really hard to be kind of holistic and really authentic in the way that we address climate.

Part of the reason that we’ve partnered with FRRR is because as a philanthropic foundation, we have a small team, and we’re not really geared up to deal with like lots of local communities and do multiple small grants to a large number of organisations across the community.

And so it’s a great partnership for us from that point of view, in that FRRR’s got the expertise, and the relationships across Queensland or across regional and rural communities. And they also have the infrastructure as an organisation to run those grant rounds, which we don’t have. We knew that if we were going to put philanthropic money towards resilience building, that sometimes those small investments, but across a number of different communities can be really, really impactful. We wanted to make sure that the money got down to the grassroots and out to the rural communities, and we didn’t have the capacity to do that. So we were looking for a partner who had the relationships and the internal mechanisms to be able to do it efficiently.

FRRR provides that for us and being able to have a focus on resilience building, and climate adaptation, was what we were looking for. FRRR had the ability and the understanding from a thematic and technical point of view about what those projects would look like in local communities. And then this year, when we came to FRRR saying, we’d like to shift from just disaster response to action on climate, FRRR was really open to that idea, and worked with us to develop the climate solutions grand rounds, so that that extra money could be focused on that as a very specific issue and a specific set of responses from local communities. Again, we didn’t have the infrastructure internally and the people to run those grant rounds and to be able to connect to local communities that we really love the fact that if FRRR already has all that. Our purpose is partnering for change, so we like to work with other organisations, and to be more efficient in the way that we give by joining together with other organisations who are already doing really good work.

There’s an interesting partnership that’s kind of complementary to the work that we do with FRRR. We also have a partnership with GIVIT. Being a Queensland organisation, we know that there’s going to be disasters during and things happening to communities during the summer, which is really unfortunate, but it happens almost every year.

So, in anticipation of that we have a placeholder in our budget for what we might be able to give to disaster. If disaster strikes, we already have a relationship set up with GIVIT where we can respond quite quickly, and we can give them funding and then they distribute that to people in need in local communities. And that’s actually through grassroots organisations. They’re a fantastic partner because they complement what we do with FRRR – so if we want to give immediate disaster relief to GIVIT, which is immediate and small amounts for things like emergency accommodation and replacement of furniture, and then, at the end of the year, if we have some budget put aside for FRRR for disaster response, which is the longer-term recovery, and the planning, and the climate adaptation work.

So those two are complementary – we see them as great partnerships for us to respond to local communities. Both organisations are really set up to support larger donors like us and distribute funds. FRRR’s expertise is in understanding local communities, and how to best inject that support that will really bolster the community’s own capability and GIVIT has a different set of skills, which is really around standing up things quickly in a disaster. So that’s an example of another partnership, but it’s kind of the way that we work – to find organisations that are doing really good work, that have great leaders that have really excellent strategies and are really good at executing. And then we partner with them and back them in their work.

Another thing that we do in our partnerships is we also really believe in that maxim about pay what it takes. With both FRRR and with GIVIT, when we work out a partnership there’s an amount that goes to the partner for their capacity. Every organisation needs governance, and you need to invest into your IT systems, and you need to invest into your people’s learning and development and all those things. And we actually believe that it’s really important when we work with partners that we have, that a good generous amount that actually goes to the organisation on expenses and work. We talk to our partners about that, and we like to understand how much is needed for those organisational costs. So that’s a key part of the way that we work as a partner.

Do have any advice for other philanthropic organisations or individuals, when choosing a not for profit to partner with?

Well, the first thing I’d say is that there’s lots of collaboration happening both with the community in the community sector between organisations that deliver services there, and amongst the funders and the organisations that give, and sometimes there’s organisations that straddle as well.

So, in the kind of area that FRRR focuses on, if you were starting out as a funder, in regional communities or in resilience building or in climate solutions or anything like that, I’d suggest there’s probably two places you could go. First one would be Philanthropy Australia. Philanthropy Australia has great networks of both organisations who deliver services and want to attract philanthropy and organisations who give and want to be part of philanthropic giving, and they have networks that they establish around different topic areas that people are interested in. So if you’re really interested in giving to Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander organisations or issues then you can you can join a network – like a learning circle around how to partner well. They have also lots of professional development opportunities and Philanthropy Australia also run a really interesting network that they call Second Gen, which is about younger people who are starting out in their giving journey, or the second generation of families who have a family history and a real tradition of giving and how to engage in in an interesting way for younger people.

Another really interesting collaborative network is called the Australian Environmental Grantmakers Network. And I know that there’s lots of people within AEGN who are long term staunch supporters of FRRR. And that’s a place where you can go to meet people who are specifically interested in environment and climate. They have a climate community of practice around giving in and responding to climate as a philanthropist or a funder, which is really quite new but really a great place to meet other people who are trying to respond to climate in both their giving and their investing.

Through FRRR you can get connected to other donors, and I think one of the things that FRRR does really well is they act as an intermediary and a channel combining funds from different organisations, so I’m sure FRRR could also be a place where you find collaborations to join.

Can you start by telling us a little about GlobalGiving?

As we look back on 2022, GlobalGiving sent out about $150 million worth in support of partners across the world – 170 countries overall. On a regular basis, we are connecting resources, both financial and otherwise, to several thousands of vetted organisations around the world and being a reliable place where individual donors and companies can come to ensure that their money and other types of resources are getting into the hands of local vetted organisations around the world.

Our mission is to transform aid and philanthropy to accelerate community-led change. So in that way, there is a lot of overlap between what GlobalGiving and FRRR want to see in the world, which is local community led organisations in the driver’s seat, where we are in the backseat, the passenger seat, whatever seat they want, as long as we are being a supportive, trusted partner such that they retain decision making power and flexibility to solve the issues in their community and serve the constituents and the communities where they work and where they serve. Because they are the ones closest to the issues at hand.

A big area of overlap between GlobalGiving and FRRR is around disaster response and disaster preparedness and just investing in local organisations so that they’re resilient in the face of future disasters. That’s also what brought us together as partners.

Our primary constituency is our non-profit partner network, of which we have about 6,000 or 7,000 vetted non-profits, and 170 countries that we work with on a regular basis in many different shapes and forms. And we also work closely, of course, with individual donors that come to us as a marketplace and companies that come to us for very much the same reasons to be connected with and to be able to get resources flexibly to these local organisations. So GlobalGiving sits in between all three of those groups. In and after times of disaster we’re able to activate all three of those groups to be able to quickly and over the long term get flexible funding into the hands of local organisations on the front lines of disaster response, both relief, recovery, preparedness, resilience, and all the rest.

That was very much the case after the 2019-2020 bushfires across Australia and so many different regions and parts of the country. And I think just to be candid and recognise at the time GlobalGiving’s non-profit partner network in Australia was not the strongest that it could have been in so many ways. So, while we made the decision to activate a response to the bush fires, it was also the case that we had a lot of work to do to build up a trusted network of organisations across Australia responding to the bushfires. GlobalGiving raised something like USD$6 million related to the bushfires through a variety of different channels. It gave us a lot of flexibility to identify and welcome new organisations, and new non-profit organisations based in Australia serving fire affected communities directly.

We were getting a lot of signals that FRRR was a trusted, reliable organisation very much in alignment with the value set of GlobalGiving, in the way that we think about responding to disasters in terms of resourcing local organisations that otherwise had been overlooked and excluded from some broader flows. Recognising there’s often the same core set of larger national organisations that really bring in the vast majority of funding and then it’s smaller local organisations that get the short shrift that at the end of the day. We heard a lot of good things from a variety of folks about how FRRR was responding in and after times of the fires, and so that brought us together. And I think more tactically, it led to a multi-year grant partnership that was bolstering and investing in the flexibility and support that FRRR was already driving out to its networks.

What is it that you look for in a not for profit that you that you partner with?

Over the lifetime of GlobalGiving, we have had an open application process for organisations that are interested in joining our community, especially on the crowdfunding side of things. So if you go to the globalgiving.org website, if you didn’t know anything about GlobalGiving, you’d be like, this is a crowdfunding platform. But there’s so much more behind the scenes happening. We’re also working on telling that story, in terms of the corporate partnerships that we have and the grant making that we do through those partnerships, the advisory and influencing work that we do in this space, all the disaster response stuff.

One of our core values is Always Open. And that can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. But we’ve always been open to welcoming organisations into our community that find use and find value in GlobalGiving’s tools, resources, and platform. Any registered organisation around the world can submit a due diligence application to GlobalGiving to take part in our crowdfunding and training program to learn how to crowdfund, how to make use of GlobalGiving’s universe of tools and resources, to raise resources through their own crowdfunding projects posted on our platform.

Sometimes over the years, we’ve promoted the GlobalGiving onboarding program in different places to try and bolster our network in certain places. And it’s also the case that many of them applied, but maybe didn’t have the registration that they needed or other things like that. So, we have a team that would try to help organisations as much as possible get through our vetting process so they can take part in our platform.

The second way that organisations come to GlobalGiving is through the corporate partnerships that we maintain and manage. GlobalGiving is also a grant making intermediary in a lot of ways, and we partner with large multinational companies, many of them based in the US, and we help to manage and coordinate the charitable grant making that these companies are interested in doing. As an example, we’ve worked with Ford Motor Company, for the last 12 or 15 years, and we are their partner to do all their grant making outside of the United States. That’s about $15 million a year in grant making that GlobalGiving does in partnership with Ford. It’s often the case where they have regional employees make recommendations for organisations in their communities that they’re passionate about, and the CSR office of Ford make recommendations to GlobalGiving, and they have the option of taking part in our platform in crowdfunding should they so wish, as a tool in their toolbox. Some of them do, some of them don’t. And then the last big avenue by which organisations come to GlobalGiving is through direct acquisition through our disaster response team. That is very much how we came to be in partnership with FRRR.

Back to your question, what we look for are organisations that are either led by or serving communities that have traditionally been excluded or marginalised or overlooked for funding or support. And at the same time, we’re also listening to our local partners and trying to understand what the funding gaps are and listening to and being receptive of trusted organisation recommendations that fit in those spaces. And that informs the organisations that we bring in, which I think in a way, is connected to how we have this focus on community-led organisations, even though it can be quite tricky to define what community led is. Because we’re working across so many different contexts across the world, and so maybe what’s community-led in one place isn’t what it means to be community-led in another.

We also have this recognition that it doesn’t make sense to connect with and welcome every single local organisation in the world into our community. So where does it make sense for GlobalGiving to form strategic partnerships with ecosystem local organisations who have a similar mindset and values orientation to GlobalGiving, and who already have trusted long term relationships with local organisations? It doesn’t make sense for us to go into a context and recreate the wheel.

What do you see as the value of partnering with community-led organisations?

I think the GlobalGiving team has been pretty heartened by the trend in the last few years where, in philanthropy in general, there is this broader recognition that local organisations and localisation writ large is the direction that we should all be heading in as quickly as possible, at the same time recognizing not much progress has been made.

I think there’s a lot of hope in and after the pandemic about what that meant for this growing wave and focus on localisation to try to move away from just funding the same organisations over and over again. Not to say that the larger international agencies are not doing great work, but it’s just that we are continuing to exclude those closest to the issues and those are the people that are going to be there for the long term.

So, I think what we’ve seen on the GlobalGiving side is a big appetite from our corporate partners to direct resources to local organisations. In large part, that’s why a lot of companies seek GlobalGiving out because we do provide that bridge and that connection to local organisations and countries. But what I would say is that it’s not always the case that they’re universally eager to support local organisations. Sometimes there is, of course, this natural inclination to just go with what you know.

GlobalGiving has what we call our growth team, or business partnerships team. Half of that team is focused on prospecting and engaging with new organisations, new companies and new corporate partners outside of our network. And then we have another half of the team that’s focused on maintaining and building relationships with existing corporate partners. I think we have about 200, or 300, different corporate partners that engage with us in different shapes and forms. What we see that works best, especially in the disaster side of things, is being able to affirm and demonstrate to our corporate donors that these local organisations are the ones that are often first on the scene, and they’re the ones that understand that context the best. And so, by virtue of GlobalGiving already having existing relationships with these organisations, we’re able to demonstrate that we’re able to get resources to them quickly and over the long term.

As an example, in the case of the February earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria, we have several dozen local organisations working in and across Türkiye. And the earthquakes happened on a Monday, and we were able to award our first round of grants that same Friday. So, we’re able to move quickly and get good resources to those Turkish registered and Turkish banked organisations who are already on the front lines of response. Many of them tragically lost staff members in the earthquakes. So, they were not only grappling with that, but also just already in the action, responding in so many ways. And so, I think that elevating those moments, and elevating the importance of how they’re well positioned helps to appeal to companies that are, oftentimes wanting to notify their employees of how quickly they’ve activated a response and different things like that.

Another strategy that we take is just like elevating the voices and stories of our local partners, which can often be much more engaging and compelling. For example, after the underwater volcano and tsunami in Tonga at the beginning of last year, the year before, one of our partners was the Civil Society Forum of Tonga. And, of course, in the middle of the pandemic, Tonga was in lockdown and not accepting or receiving international volunteers or visitors. So, we were able to elevate the perspective and voice of our local partner on working across many of the islands of Tonga that our other NGO partners did not have, because they were prevented from going.

And it is part of our mission to transform philanthropy. How can we build deeper relationships and have dedicated conversations to keep pushing that focus forward? We’re happy to see that corporate partners are receptive, but they’re not always. But we keep trying anyway.

What you’re saying about having those trusted relationships on the ground is so important. Huge kudos to you and the GlobalGiving team for all that you do, with an incredible breadth of organisations that you support.