In Funding Round 1 for 2024, the Foundation awarded $7,650,584 in grants. These comprised major grants totalling $5 million, two Community Wellbeing grants totalling $750,000, an Early Childhood Development grant for $456,000, and Arts funding totalling $1,344,584, including funding to The Ian Potter Cultural Trust for Emerging Artists grants.

Major Grants

Good360 Australia Ltd
Good360 Growth Strategy 2030
$3 million
Over 3 years

Good360's mission is to ensure excess goods go to people in need, not landfills. Good360 Australia started operations in Australia in 2014 and currently redistributes about $130 million worth of goods (about 9 million items) annually, diverting about 2,000 tons of products from landfills in partnership with over 50 corporates. Since its inception, Good360 has distributed over $400m worth of goods (about 40 million items), avoiding disposing of over 6,500 tons of product in landfills.

The Foundation has supported Good360 with several program grants (totalling $1 million) since 2014. This $3 million major grant will enable Good360  to scale its operations, redistributing unsold goods to a larger number of charities. Core funding is necessary to expand Good360's capacity to a target of 30% of the addressable market share within the next 5–10 years, bringing the total redistribution value of goods since its inception to $1 billion.

Good360 operates a sophisticated logistics operation, including a central warehouse in Western Sydney. It partners with major retailers and gathers and donates a large volume of goods.

Examples of goods include toys, linen and bedding, personal hygiene products, cleaning products, clothes, shoes, white goods, apparel, electronics, computers and laptops, furniture, books, etc. Over 4,000 charities are on Good360's books, of which about 1,000 regularly receive goods.

The next phase of Good360's growth involves:

• Developing partnerships to grow new industry partners (goods, transport, technology, digital, media, funding, etc.) and charity networks to distribute the goods to communities.
• Strengthening relationships with governments to increase the funding Good360 receives.
• Improving technology to meet stakeholders' rapidly evolving needs and provide efficient solutions that are superior to past methods.
• Promoting education campaigns to improve awareness that businesses should donate goods to communities and not send them to landfills.

Australian Land Conservation Alliance (ALCA)
ALCA capacity building initiative
$2 million
Over 4 years

Nature and biodiversity conservation is now a national priority. Australia's international obligations under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework include achieving 30% of land and 30% of waters protected by 2030. Meeting this commitment requires protecting at least a further 60 million hectares of land. This could be in the form of National or State parks or on private land. Increasing private lands under protection is critical to achieving this target.

Formed in 2009 as an informal coalition of a dozen environmental NGOs, the Australian Land Conservation Alliance (ALCA) has become Australia's only peak body representing environmental organisations that work to conserve, manage, and restore nature on privately managed land. ALCA's mission is to reverse nature loss by growing a diverse, highly capable and resourced private land conservation sector that protects, stewards and restores over half of Australia's land and water for a healthy and resilient Australia.

Over four years, this $2 million major grant will support organisational capacity building at ALCA, enabling it to achieve its 2030 Strategy, which will support the environment sector and Australian governments to achieve their nature conservation targets.

ALCA released its ambitious 2030 Strategy: Protecting and Stewarding for Nature in March 2022 but has had insufficient staff to deliver it. At the same time, it is experiencing an increased demand for its services and advice (particularly from governments), and interest in membership is growing rapidly.

The 2030 Strategy has four goals:

• Sector Development
• Policy and Regulation reforms
• Investment in nature conservation on private lands
• Engage the wider public.

This funding for capacity-building will assist ALCA in delivering the first three of these goals by engaging outstanding people to fill crucial roles.

Program grants

Community Wellbeing

WISE Employment Ltd
WISE IDEA-Toolkit: Equipping social enterprises and other businesses with best-practice support for employees with mental illness
$450,000
Over 3 years

WISE Employment (WISE) is an Australian not-for-profit employment services provider established in 1992 to assist people with disability and from disadvantage into employment. For 30 years, WISE has empowered job seekers to take control of their employment journey, helping over a quarter of a million people find meaningful work in all Australian states and territories.

People with mental illness want to work. Work benefits mental health and wellbeing, social and economic participation, and reduces stigma. However, gaining and maintaining employment is challenging for this group, with only 25% still employed after six months of commencement.

Employers are uncertain about how best to support employees with mental illness, and whilst there has been investment in programs creating mentally healthy spaces for all staff, there is little support on how to manage staff experiencing serious mental health issues. Many social enterprises have been developed to create employment for people with mental illness, but few have relevant expertise or ready access to professional mental health support.

WISE has developed a comprehensive program (WISE IDEA) promoting best-practice intervention in three areas needed to sustain employment outcomes. The WISE IDEA–Toolkit focuses on supporting employers in providing responsive work environments and builds on the successful WISE Ways to Work pilot program (also supported by the Foundation). WISE will pilot a support program where a mental health specialist and occupational therapist will be embedded in the workplace to assess employees' needs and workplace practices to equip employers with relevant and practical skills to create supporting and effective work environments for people with mental health issues.

There is a strong case for the need for this type of support: despite many online guides for managers and staff around mental health in the workplace, hands-on specialist mental health expertise, suitable adjustments, mentoring, and support options are not readily available to employers, affecting the efficiency of business operations and staff wellbeing.

Wilya Ajjul Janta Aboriginal Corporation
Wilya Janta – Tennant Creek Housing Pilot Project
$300,000
Over 3 years

Wilya Janta means Standing Strong in the Warumungu language of the area surrounding Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory. It is also the name of an innovative Aboriginal cultural housing design consultancy founded on long and deep cross-cultural relationships of trust between its Indigenous and non-Indigenous founders. Wilya Janta aims to promote community agency in designing and constructing remote Indigenous housing.

Seeking to re-invent the remote housing design and construction lifecycle, Wilya Janta puts the tenant at the centre of the design process with the core aim of building culturally appropriate homes. Wilya Janta recognises the Warumungu people's experience and knowledge about how to live well in a very hot climate. Coupled with architectural, construction and engineering expertise, this knowledge paves the way for remote communities to live better and thrive, even in the face of climate change.

The Tennant Creek Housing Pilot is a community-led design of two demonstration homes using competitive and innovative construction processes. It is based on combining local knowledge of climate-resilient and culturally appropriate design with remote housing innovation, cost-effectiveness, and scalability. The dwellings will house two extended families and be used as display homes to showcase an innovative and sustainable design and construction model.

This initiative provides an extraordinary opportunity for Wilya Janta to influence future infrastructure policy to ensure new buildings are fit-for-purpose and financially and environmentally viable.

Early Childhood Development

UNICEF Australia
EVERY CHILD COUNTS: Achieving Universal Birth Registration in Australia
$456,000
Over 2 years

UNICEF Australia is a leading advocate for the rights and well-being of children and young people in Australia, working alongside key government stakeholders. A critical component of its work is mobilising political will, strengthening policy, and increasing investment to address inequality.

Birth registration is a child's passport to protection, establishing their existence under the law and allowing their full participation in society. Australia enjoys a high rate of birth registrations (98%) under the age of 5 years. However, under-registration of births of children in lower socio-economic areas persists and goes unacknowledged, particularly affecting First Nations communities and those from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds. UNICEF Australia has a vision in which the birth of every child is registered, enabling them to enjoy all their rights throughout their lives fully.

The true extent of birth under-registration in Australia is currently unknown. Pockets of data indicate the need – a study in Queensland revealed that 15–18% of births to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mothers were not registered, compared to 1.8% of births to non-Indigenous mothers. Without birth registration, these children and families face significant barriers to obtaining a passport, driver's license, tax file number or bank account and, therefore, are invisible under the law.

This grant provides funding to support UNICEF in researching the true extent of the problem, consulting communities about barriers (and solutions), registering 500 children at the same time, and running an education campaign to raise public awareness and support for the issue.

Menzies School of Health Research

In addition to grants awarded in April 2024, we are pleased to announce a $2.5 million major grant to the Menzies School of Health Research for the Building the Local Health Workforce in the Northern Territory initiative. This grant was awarded in April 2023 but was subject to further funding being secured. We are pleased that additional funding has now been confirmed.  

The Menzies School of Health Research (Menzies) is one of Australia's leading medical research institutes. It is dedicated to improving the health and well-being of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and is a leader in global and tropical health research into life-threatening diseases.

This major grant will support Menzies to scale up its youth-focused education and training pathways pilot program. This program responds to systemic health workforce shortages in the Northern Territory, which have led to a reliance on costly fly-in-fly-out healthcare models that are dependent on transient interstate health workers and do not develop essential capacities. There is an under-utilised potential to grow a local health workforce by recognising and overcoming the educational barriers faced by the widely dispersed NT population that disproportionately impact First Nations youth.

This First Nations-led program features an adaptive training model that actively engages youth through school outreach programs across the Territory and supports them through tailored pathways into employment and leadership positions in the health workforce. This unique model is underpinned by pastoral care, deep relationships, cultural support, and student-centred learning designed to directly address the unique and complex challenges impacting health, education and employment outcomes in the Northern Territory.

The program aims to deliver long-term systems change by developing a critical mass of empowered local people with autonomy and agency in the health workforce.

Details of all grants awarded in this round can be found in the Grants Database.