Eligibility

Before preparing your application, please make sure your organisation is eligible to apply to the Trust for a grant.

The Trust can only give grants to organisations situated within Victoria and endorsed with charity tax concession status (TCC) by the Australian Tax Office (ATO) for projects taking place solely in Victoria.

1. Applicable Tax Status

Your organisation must be endorsed by the ATO as a:

• Charitable Institution; or

• Public Benevolent Institution; or

• Health Promotion Charity.

• and income tax exempt.

Please note this is not the same as Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) status. Unlike some other philanthropic trusts and foundations, the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust does not require you to have this.

We cannot make grants to other ‘funds’ so organisations endorsed by the ATO as a ‘Charitable Fund’ are ineligible for a grant.

To find out your organisation’s endorsement, please visit the Government’s ABN Lookup website at www.abr.business.gov.au and do a search on your organisation to see if you have TCC status. Click here to see a sample TCC endorsement or on the left of this web page. If you have the required endorsement and are proceeding with your grant proposal, please print out a copy from the website to include with your application.

2. Location

Your organisation must be situated and operate solely within Victoria.

If your organisation is part of a national organisation and/or has operations outside Victoria (eg. offices/branches/services), it must have a separately constituted Victorian Board of Management and produce separate financial statements. An example of this is the Australian Red Cross.

If you are a Victorian branch of a national organisation with a Victorian board of management as described above, we also require a copy of the organisation’s constitution and written assurance that the organisation does not intend to operate or apply any of the grant funds outside Victoria.