Leading specialist trustee company, Equity Trustees proudly facilitated the distribution of $66.5 million to the not-for-profit sector in the last financial year.
Forty five percent of funding went to medical research and health initiatives, followed by nearly 14% directed towards projects and organisations supporting children and young people.
Equity Trustees is very proud of the role we play in managing philanthropic trusts and foundations and we take our responsibility for providing funding of this scale to the not-for-profit sector and charitable causes in Australia very seriously,” said Mick O’Brien, Managing Director.
The $66.5m generated from over 500 trusts managed by Equity Trustees was spread across more than 1,300 organisations, empowering change by contributing to funding a vast range of programs and projects across Australia. Some examples include:
- The Hector W Pride Charitable Trust’s grant of $276,000 over three years to the Brotherhood of St Laurence to enable the installation of roof top solar panels on 50 properties managed by Community Housing providers and complete an evaluation of outcomes achieved in energy efficiency and bill reduction.
- The A.N. Carmichael Memorial Fund’s grant of $500,000 over five years to the Australian Red Cross Society to trial a program to build the life skills of the women in the Townsville Women’s Correctional Centre to avoid criminal behaviour, reduce recidivism and enhance their connection to
- community.The J. O. & J. R. Wicking Trust’s grant of close to $400,000 over three years to support the GroundSwell Project to develop and pilot a national Death Literacy Benchmark tool, conduct the first national survey of death literacy and disseminate their findings.
- John Saville Eastwood Estate and Selwyn Henry Langston Trust collaborated to provide Sacred Heart City Mission with $40,000 to develop innovative care solutions for some of Victoria’s most disadvantaged and vulnerable older people. Sacred Heart City Mission seeks to effectively counter the indirect discrimination Australia’s recent Aged Care reforms impose on older people experiencing homelessness and other forms of disadvantage and enables them to easily access and maintain the care services they need and to which they are entitled.
“The expertise and professionalism of our granting team is critical to this process. Particularly for discretionary trusts,” explained Jodi Kennedy, General Manager of Charitable Trusts and Philanthropy.
“Our team has specific expertise in managing complex granting schemes and extensive knowledge of the not-for-profit sector, so they understand the context and challenges of the organisations and programs we are funding.”
Ms Kennedy explained Equity Trustees was increasingly looking to establish longer-term granting arrangements that promote collaboration amongst funders and provide greater certainty for leading organisations so they can focus more on innovation and excellence and less on year-on-year fundraising.
“A good example of this is the recently launched Medical Research and Health Partnership program which combined the resources of 24 philanthropic trusts and directed more than $3m over three years to the Mater Foundation, Monash Partners and the National Foundation for Medical Research and Innovation (NFMRI). We want to empower change and ensure the philanthropic money we are entrusted to manage can achieve the result envisioned by the founders of the trusts in a sustainable way.
“Equity Trustees is in a unique position to help grow the philanthropic culture of Australia. As a leading provider of philanthropic funding, we have a responsibility to ensure that funds distributed have a real and sustained impact on the challenges we face as a community today and into the future,” she concluded.