You want to be the pebble in the pond that creates the ripple for change.” So said Apple CEO, Tim Cook, when he announced his intention to give his fortune away to charity.

Creating impact and achieving positive social change is the driving force for contemporary philanthropy. Regardless of whether the gift is

the size of a small pebble or a giant boulder, impact is the order of the day for philanthropists globally and locally.

Nowhere was that sentiment more pronounced than at the 2017 Australian Philanthropy Awards, an annual initiative of the sector’s peak body, Philanthropy Australia.

Around 200 members of the nation’s burgeoning philanthropic community were on hand to recognise and celebrate the year’s best examples of strategic giving at the event hosted in Melbourne by NAB.

“Although Australian philanthropic organisations stand at the forefront of innovation, their important work is often done behind the scenes,” said Philanthropy Australia chief executive Sarah Davies said.

“The Awards showcase the many impressive examples of great leadership in philanthropic giving and by sharing those achieve-ments both within and beyond the sector, our goal is to inspire more and better philanthropy.”

The work of six strategic funders was honoured on the night with the winner of each category having been assessed by a panel of peers and senior philanthropic practitioners.

Chair of the 2017 Judging Panel, Genevieve Timmons, said that choosing the award winners from an impressive field of contenders wasn’t easy.

“It was heartening to see the diversity of issues, ideas and thinking, geographic locations, approaches and innovations represented in the nominations,” Timmons said.

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“Determining the final winners was not easy—there were many strong examples of best-practice philanthropy, and although we can only have one winner, five of our six categories have special mentions attached to them.”

And the winner is… Best Small Grant of the YearThe first award presentation of the evening was Best Small Grant, a category that paid homage to the fact that achieving impact and catalysing social change needn’t always equate to big sums of money.

Nominations for Best Small Grant were assessed against demon-strated innovation and risk; collaboration and potential for longer-term benefits and impact—and all achieved with a grant of $50,000 or less.

Two special mentions were given ahead of the announcement of the winner, both for the same organisation, the Victorian-based Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal (FRRR).

FRRR’s first mention was for its $10,000 ABC Heywire Youth Inno-vation Grant for the Boots for Change program which has helped sup-port local farmers and encouraged young people to work in agriculture.

The second acknowledgement was for FRRR’s support of Toolan-gi Castella Community House’s Fit for Free Program, a community fitness and wellbeing program funded initially as an interim measure for recovery from the 2009 bushfires, which has gone on to deliver significant long-term community benefits.

Winner of Best Small Grant of the Year was The Funding Net-work (TFN) for Manjeri, a taxi bus social enterprise in Uganda. Af-ter raising $17,900 at a TFN live crowdfunding event, Manjeri was able to leverage the funding to attract almost $300,000 in additional funding from TFN’s networks and board members, along with in-kind support from Google, Macquarie Group, Australian Impact Investments and KPMG.

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TFN co-founder and chief executive, Lisa Cotton, said the out-sized impact is testament to the power of collective giving, backed by TFN’s capacity-building approach which has fast-tracked Manjeri’s ability to scale and build sustainable schools and communities.

Best Large Grant of the YearCompetition was tough for Best Large Grant (more than $50,000) which honoured co-designed community impact; quality partner-ships and collaboration; shared learning; breakthrough thinking and a future focus.

Two special mentions were made—the first being for the AMP Foundation and its seed funding for The Funding Network (TFN) which has helped the organisation grow its impact with grassroots charities, non-profits and social enterprises.

The second special mention was The Wilson Foundation, the fam-ily foundation of Sydney investment manager, Geoff Wilson, for its support of the Foundation for Young Australians’ 2016 Young Social Pioneers (YSP) Incubator program.

Winner of Best Large Grant was The Myer Foundation for its ongoing support of ClimateWorks Australia, the independent re-search-based non-profit committed to facilitating reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The Foundation’s support has amount-ed to $6.2 million to date.

Myer Foundation President, Martyn Myer, was on hand to collect the award and described the ClimateWorks grant as “almost certain-ly the best grant the Foundation has ever made in its 60-year history.”

“Under the leadership of Chair, John Thwaites, and CEO, Anna Skarbek, ClimateWorks delivers cutting-edge, cross-disciplinary research into today’s sustainability challenges in order to stimulate emissions reductions,” Myer continued.

“They have found and shared with all tiers of government across both sides of politics and a growing number of businesses, that Aus-tralia already has the technologies we need to achieve meaningful emissions reductions. Following the pathways that ClimateWorks has modelled, we know our lifestyles don’t need to fundamentally change: our economy can keep growing and we can reach our end goal of Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050.”

Gender-wise Philanthropy AwardThe Gender-wise Philanthropy Award, supported by the Australian Women Donor’s Network, recognised achievements from funding initiatives that advance gender equity through investment in projects or organisations that support women and girls.

The work of Victoria’s Edward Wilson Trust and its support of Women’s Property Initiative’s Reynard Street Townhouse Develop-ment received a special mention.

In announcing the Gender-wise Philanthropy winner, The Caledo-nia Foundation with Good Pitch’s Hunting Ground Australia Project, Sarah Davies, Philanthropy Australia CEO praised the Foundation’s recognition of the importance of gender in achieving social change.

“They understand that social issues often impact women and men differently and that it’s necessary to consider these differences in or-der to achieve maximum impact,” Davies said.

“Gender, and how it relates to other diverse factors such as age, ethnicity, socio-economic status, disability and more, has been a key consideration in many projects they have funded over time.

“The Caledonia Foundation views the gender intersect as the funda-mental starting point, they look at what the key issues are in Australia that we need to advance. They have a true gender lens approach, putting women’s issues at the forefront across a range of issues.”

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Environmental Philanthropy AwardThe Environmental Philanthropy Award, supported by the Australian Environmental Grantmakers Network, was another category that received high calibre nomina-tions, with two special mentions supplementing the an-nouncement of the category winner.

Demonstrating leadership, ambition, innovation, risk, transformational change, measurable impact and more, special mentions went to Purves Environmental Fund for the Boomerang Alliance which helped build a com-munity movement for container deposit schemes, and The Norman Wettenhall Foundation for its support of Loddon Plains Landcare Network’s landscape restora-tion through its GOANNA project.

The winner of the Environmental Philanthropy Award was one of the country’s most recognisable philanthropic foundations, The Ian Potter Foundation, for its capac-ity building support totalling $278,000 for the Reel Life Survey (RLS), Tasmania.

RLS coordinates the technical training and partici-pation of volunteer divers as citizen scientists in marine expeditions, surveying reef sites around Australia and globally, and gathering high-quality data. Led by marine scientists, divers record fish and invertebrate species seen along underwater transects, then upload their data into a publicly-accessible database which is an invaluable global resource for species identification and for mapping envi-ronmental threats and trends.

Craig Connelly, CEO of The Ian Potter Foundation, said the Foundation was “proud to support such an inno-vative and impactful environmental grant that will assist many Australians and communities internationally to

start to understand what lies beneath the ocean waters.”“The Reef Life Survey is a wonderful example of well-

designed scientific research effectively leveraging citizen science volunteers into comprehensive baseline data that is directly influencing policy at all levels of government,” Connelly said.

“The fact that this project has progressed to multiple sites nationally and internationally is a credit to the pro-ject designers and the hundreds of passionate and skilled volunteers.”

Indigenous Philanthropy AwardThe inaugural Indigenous Philanthropy Award, present-ed by Ninti One, celebrated philanthropic investments that recognised, supported and empowered Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities.

Australian Communities Foundation Indigenous Giv-ing Circle received a special mention for its support of Aboriginal-led organisation, SNAICC to operate Abo-riginal childcare centres improving outcomes for young Indigenous children.

The Salteri family’s CAGES Foundation was also ac-knowledged for its partnership with Ngroo Education Inc enabling Aboriginal families to improve the delivery of early childhood services by 50 per cent in rural com-munities.

The winner of the 2017 Indigenous Philanthropy Award was Social Ventures Australia (SVA) for its con-tribution to Indigenous arts enterprise, Marnin Studio, Marninwarntikura Fitzroy Women’s Resource Centre.

Marnin Studio supports local women to produce products that provide them with income. In addition to

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providing the local Indigenous women with economic and enterprise opportunities, the studio also empowers women with professional arts training, therapeutic heal-ing, leadership skills and other support services.

Susan Metcalf from SVA said the organisation believes better outcomes can be achieved through collaboration and strategic philanthropy, explaining that the partner-ship between SVA and Marnin Studio was co-designed and developed with mutual objectives and a focus on sharing lessons and joint advocacy.

Leading Philanthropist AwardThe night’s biggest honour recognised a leader in phi-lanthropy whose achievements and contributions to the field were visionary, high impact and transformative. The winner of the 2017 Leading Philanthropist Award was Sydney-based philanthropist and documentary film maker, Ian Darling.

It would be difficult to overestimate Darling’s philan-thropic impact—since 2014, his work with Good Pitch Australia has raised more than $14 million for 19 docu-mentary films and their social impact campaigns, and helped forge more than 300 strategic partnerships.

Accepting the award, Darling said he was humbled to be recognised and that he shared the award with the en-tire philanthropic community.

Recounting his giving journey, Darling paid tribute to his team at Good Pitch Australia, Shark Island Institute, Documentary Australia Foundation and the Caledonia Foundation.

“I can assure you that our willingness to fail and take risks has been a really important part of the journey,” Darling said.

“Over the last decade we’ve tried to be as strategic as possible with our philanthropic work. Certainly every bit as strategic as we are with our business and creative ac-tivities. Hopefully we’ve been bold and brave along the way, but I know there’s still so much more we can do.”

Darling went on to attribute much of his philanthropic impact to the power of storytelling.

“Story telling has been at the heart of our philanthrop-ic strategy,” he said.

“There is great power that comes with humanising a complex issue and putting a real face and name to a cause.

“In our philanthropic work we’ve tried to be strategic at every level, to think like owners so that our philan-thropic activities have felt like a true partnership. We have wanted to create a national conversation, raising awareness across a broad range of issues, and along the way giving a voice to the voiceless. But also to do far more than just raise awareness, to create real and last-ing change.

“We are attempting to inform the policy debate across Australia, which will hopefully lead to better policy in a challenging environment.

“We’ve tried to do a lot, with relatively little and our work is about creating greater value out of every dollar committed to philanthropy, through collaboration and engaged philanthropy that gives scale, and provides a platform for foundations and individual donors to work together and achieve the highest return on their contri-bution to society possible.”

Darling epitomises the best of Australian philanthro-py. His commitment to collaboration and strategic giv-ing has created a formidable social change ripple from a modest-sized stone. Tim Cook would be proud. fs

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We are attempting to inform the policy debate across Australia.

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