Deadline: 25-Mar-2024
Applications are now open for the Groundswell Grant Program that provide grants to strategic, high-impact climate action.
Grant Categories
- Groundswell grant rounds rotate between two types:
- Project/campaign funding – funds to pay for specific climate advocacy projects carried out by people or organisations, such as an event, training, report, piece of polling, research or a communications tactic like advertising. Groundswell does project funding as part of their donors’ learning journey, because it’s an easy entry point into understanding climate advocacy.
- Core, unrestricted funding – the grant recipient has discretion to use the funds wherever they’re most needed. This often means paying for staff and costs related to them doing their jobs well, like budgets for communications, meetings, training and professional development, technology costs like constituent relationship management systems, media monitoring, and bringing in contractors to accelerate big pieces of work or react to opportunities that come up.
What they fund?
- They support organisations creating the social, economic and political conditions to reduce emissions to levels that will avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
- They fund climate action that:
- Builds the movement: Powerful community-led campaigns that bring new and diverse people into the climate movement to shape the national conversation on climate action. Success looks like a powerful, vibrant, well-connected movement that is continually growing and achieving more ambitious reforms to cut greenhouse pollution and solve the climate crisis.
- Changes the story: Storytelling that reaches a wide range of Australians and motivates people to do what it takes to make the world they need. Success looks likes published narratives that expose the damage of fossil fuel polluters and inspire a cultural shift towards ambitious climate action.
- Shifts the money: Strategies that shift the financial sector away from fossil fuels and into renewable energy, including divestment campaigns, shareholder activism and corporate social license campaigns. Success looks like reduced flows of capital for dirty industries and increased levels of capital flowing for clean economy initiatives.
- Changes the politics: Campaigns and strategies designed to directly influence politicians to take greater leadership on climate change, such as think tanks or constituency groups. Success looks new policy and laws being introduced and enforced to solve the climate crisis.
Criteria
- If you’re a not-for-profit organisation working to reduce emissions to safer levels this decade, then you’re exactly who they fund. If your work focuses on climate justice and making sure no one is left behind in the race to decarbonise, then they’d also love to hear from you.
- When it comes to protecting the environment, they know reducing waste and plastic pollution are incredibly important, but these issues sit outside their funding mission and so if this is your organisations focus area, you’re not eligible for a Groundswell grant.
- They recognise First Nations peoples protection and care of Country as a fundamental and urgent climate solution and strongly encourage Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations to apply for their grants.
- They believe in the outsized impact grassroots groups can have and are conscious that small to medium sized organisations have the least access to funding, so if your revenue is less than $5 million a year they strongly encourage you to apply.
- Please note, only organisations in the Australia Pacific region with DGR1 status or working in partnership with a DGR1 organisation are eligible to apply.
For more information, visit Groundswell.