The Trust’s focus is on those Victorians who are experiencing socio-economic disadvantage due to their geographic location, gender, age, ability or citizenship, and the communities disproportionately impacted by natural disasters.

Our strategic snapshot:

COMMUNITY FOCUS AREAS:

HMSTrust is focusing on two critical areas of need that we consider as fundamental to community wellbeing.

• Advancing early childhood development

• Building community financial resilience

We encourage projects that show vision and an innovative approach to solving both entrenched and evolving problems. Initiatives must be based on current sector research that reinforces the community need and gap in service delivery that you propose to fill. Strategic collaboration and partnership, community consultation, potential for further development and long-term outcomes are all attributes that the Trust values highly.

Advancing early childhood development

Early childhood is considered to be the most important developmental phase in the human lifespan. The Trust seeks systemic and service-based funding opportunities that aim to advance the development of children in the first five years of life. We will consider initiatives that focus on the social, emotional and cognitive development of disadvantaged pre-school children and that use targeted early intervention to redress inequality for the most vulnerable children by implementing a whole-community, cross-sectoral approach to supporting healthy developmental outcomes for children and families.

Building community financial resilience

We seek to support financial literacy and capability building initiatives that are designed to improve the financial inclusion, resilience and wellbeing of Victorians who are less advantaged. Such initiatives may include upskilling, mentoring, capability and capacity building of individuals and/or communities to improve their financial literacy.

Financial literacy and capability tends to be lower among females, lower-income individuals, the unemployed or disabled, the young, migrants and refugees, Indigenous peoples, and those with lower levels of education. These groups have also been impacted the most by the current COVID-19 crisis. Vulnerable Victorians are financially disadvantaged, placing them and their families at a higher risk of experiencing financial stress and hardship leading to overall poorer social, educational, emotional and health outcomes.

Our impact goals:

Applications are required to strongly align with at least one of our three impact goals:

• Building organisational capacity and sustainability
  Stronger organisations are able to deliver stronger outcomes. The impacts of COVID-19 have highlighted vulnerable business models and limited resources that hamper the ability to embrace new ways of working.
• Changing sector practice
  We seek to support solutions that have the potential to change entrenched sector practices that are no longer addressing the needs of our target beneficiaries across the Trust’s areas of interest.
• Contributing to systems change
  In order to address the root causes of the social problems that impact the communities we choose to support, we will focus on the components and structures of the systems that drive social change.

In addition to addressing Focus areas and Impact goals, we look for an alignment of vision, purpose and values, and expect the funding opportunities to address two further key elements of our grants framework: Target beneficiaries, and Levers for change.

Our target beneficiaries:

Because our core purpose is equity of opportunity for all Victorians, we apply an equity lens on the following target beneficiary groups experiencing socio-economic disadvantage.

Although many funding proposals will likely address more than one target beneficiary group, we ask applicants to identify the primary group that will directly benefit from the proposed project.

• Women & Girls
• Indigenous Peoples
• Migrants & Refugees
• Communities experiencing inadequate resources and opportunities
• Future generations impacted by current social, economic and environmental practices

Our levers for change:

Every grant, small or large, one-off or multi-year, contributes to greater equity of opportunity for all Victorians.

Five levers for change have been identified by the Trust as priority mechanisms for delivering on our three impact goals: building sustainable and capable organisations, changing sector practice, and contributing to systems change.

• Capacity building
• Innovation
• Delivery
• Scaling
• Advocacy

Where we fund:

The Trust’s legal remit is to fund charitable institutions and purposes in Victoria only.

Rural and regional Victoria is a priority focus for the Trust, reflecting one of the primary sources of Helen’s bequest. For the first time, a minimum 35% annual distribution target, averaged over rolling three-year periods, has been allocated to initiatives that directly benefit rural and regional Victorian communities.

What we look for:

We expect the funding opportunity to be community led, fully scoped, and not replicating or duplicating an existing service or model. We encourage collaboration and partnership and carefully consider the potential for long-term impact against risk. We look for the potential for: leverage; sustainability beyond the funding period; and a commitment to evaluation and dissemination of findings.

Our grant rounds:

We have four grant rounds and funding levels across the year that reflect the needs of grantees so that they can best serve their communities. See Grants Rounds for detail.

Our grantee database and case studies:

View the list of approved grants in our Grantee Database or read case studies of past and current grants. Although all grants approved before July 2021 relate to previous grant strategies, the underlying qualities of our grants, in particular those approved in the past four years, reflect the Trust’s current decision-making principles.