Impact Grants approved in November 2017

We are pleased to advise the Trustees recently approved eight new Impact Grants totalling $1.46m for projects to benefit people and communities across Victoria. The new Impact Grants are the first grants to be approved under HMSTrust’s revised programs, focus areas, and key objectives introduced earlier this year.

Impact Grants of up to $200,000 are for well-developed projects, with clearly defined milestones based on solid data. The application process is lengthy and comprises three stages: an initial grant enquiry (ahead of the opening date of the grant round) comprising a discussion or meeting with grants staff to gain an understanding of the project and organisation. Selected projects are provided with an access code and invited to make an initial application. From these Stage 1 applications, a shortlist of projects are invited to respond to specific questions relevant to their project and to submit a second-stage application for consideration and final approval by Trustees. The entire process takes a minimum of four months and may take longer, depending on when the initial enquiry and discussions commenced.

For the 2017 grants round, HMSTrust received 75 enquiries with 18 projects invited to make a Stage 1 application. From these, ten projects were shortlisted to continue to a Stage 2 application and submitted to the Board for consideration, with eight projects awarded grants as outlined in the table below. We congratulate our new Impact grantees and look forward to implementation of their projects.

Program Area	Organisation	Project Title	Funding Purpose	Grant Amount
Arts and Culture	Channel 31	Community Builder	To build a sustainable social enterprise unit of C31 that delivers digital communication projects to support the goals, activities and business models of Victorian non-profit organisations.	$160,050
Community	Good Shepherd Microfinance	Building Financial Resilience for Geelong families through the Local Resilience Action Plan (LRAP) Program	To trial and evaluate a program enabling Geelong-based organisations to understand financial vulnerability and take action to address financial hardship; build capability; microenterprise skills; and access to safe, affordable finance	$197,500
Education	Australian Centre for Rural Entrepreneurship	Scaling the ‘Social Enterprise in Schools’ program across Victoria.	Implement independent evaluation findings for the provision of teacher materials, resources, networks and evaluation frameworks in order to scale the highly successful ‘Social Enterprise in Schools Program’ across Victoria.	$200,000
	Australian Federation of Disability Organisations	Diversity Field Officer Service – Developing a sustainable model of delivery to improve employment outcomes	To build on pilot outcomes and implement a sustainable employer-engagement model for small and medium sized businesses to employ, retain and include people with disability within the workplace	$165,000
	State Schools’ Relief Inc	Glasses for Kids – The Rural Regional 2018	To deliver a program to remove vision impairment as a significant potential barrier to engagement in education.	$151,907
	Victoria University	AVID: Developing a replicable model for improving and sustaining education outcomes in targeted disadvantaged communities	To implement AVID using a communities of practice approach in two locations of entrenched social inequalities and disadvantages, Geelong and Ballarat. This model will be replicable in other regions.	$199,280
Environment	Earthwatch Institute	Stronger Together: Building resilient parks through community stewardship	To support sustainability of Victoria’s parks by developing trails for species monitoring, and training and connecting schools and community members to collect vital data for Parks Victoria management plans.	$187,654
	Trust For Nature (Victoria)	Building a long-term legacy of sustainable lands-use on the Northern Plains through community and stewardship	To establish a targeted landholder extension program, as the foundation for achieving our Conservation Plan goals for protection and management and restoration on private land across the Northern Plains.	$200,000