Deadline: 17-Aug-20
Westpac Groups has launched the Safer Children, Safer Communities Impact Grants Program to support community organisations and not-for-profits that are working across a range of child safety and protection programs and initiatives.
Safer Children, Safer Communities work program want to work with organisations that are helping to protect and create safer communities for children in Australia, with a focus on helping prevent the sexual exploitation and abuse of children, including online sexual exploitation of children.
Target Areas
Through the Impact Grants they are looking to support the following target areas:
- Raising awareness and understanding: Raising awareness and understanding of child exploitation, including online child sexual exploitation and creating a sense of urgency to act in business, across industry and society.
- Technology: Investing in technology or other means of collaboration to help detect, monitor, report and prevent harm to children.
- Education and prevention: Investing in the delivery of effective educational, e-safety and child sexual exploitation and abuse prevention programs and initiatives particularly to at-risk and vulnerable youth and children and their families.
- Response and recovery: Investing in the provision of trauma-informed services including response, recovery, and remedy to survivors in a way which complements and/or enhances existing services and puts children’s needs first.
Funding Information
There are two types of Impact Grants:
- Seed grants: Up to 12 one-off grants of $50,000 for early stage programs and initiatives or organisations building, testing, or piloting an innovative idea.
- Scale grants: Up to eight multi-year grants of $300,000 per year over three years for organisations with existing evidence-based innovative models looking to scale and move to their next stage of growth.
Funding Principles
The funding principles outlined below will guide the investments:
- Outcome focused and measurable: They invest in programs and initiatives that create meaningful and measurable change and specifically align with the outcomes they have prioritised for Safer Children, Safer Communities.
- Expansion: They seek to deepen and scale the efforts, reach and effectiveness of programs, initiatives and organisations safeguarding and protecting children.
- Long-term impact: They prioritise programs and initiatives that endeavour to create positive impact for children and their families beyond the period of funding.
- Engage and empower children: They support organisations that prevent harm to children by engaging them in the design of programs and initiatives using a child safe approach which empowers children and young people of their rights.
- Collaboration: They look for programs and initiatives run by organisations that will share learnings, research and insights and collaborate with other child-focused stakeholders working to safeguard, protect and care for children.
Eligibility Criteria
To be eligible to apply for an Impact Grant, your organisation must meet the following criteria:
- Your organisation is registered in Australia as a not-for-profit and endorsed by the ATO as holding Deductible Gift Recipient Item 1 status. To determine if your organisation has DGR Item 1 status, enter your organisation’s ABN into the ABN Lookup tool on the Australian Business Register.
- Your organisation and proposed program or initiative is aligned with the funding principles and seeking to create impact across one or more of the target areas they are looking to fund.
- Your proposed program or initiative responds to a clear need or gap, and ideally builds upon or interacts with existing solutions.
- Your organisation has a safeguarding or child protection policy in place (and associated procedures, including data privacy) or is willing to develop a policy.
For more information, visit https://www.westpac.com.au/about-westpac/sustainability/our-positions-and-perspectives/safer-children-safer-communities-grants/