
Five years of the Impact Fund
How It Works
Adrianne Walters (second from left), Acting Legal Director at the Human Rights Law Centre (HLRC), has been crucial to HRLC’s successful work in protecting reproductive rights, which was supported by the Impact Fund in 2018. Credit: HRLC.
MAKING CHANGE TOGETHER
FIVE YEARS OF THE IMPACT FUND

How It Works
1.
Supporting the work
Your donation to the Impact Fund is pooled with others. All donations are responsibly invested and income from investments helps grow the Fund. This is just one way you can show your support. You can also contribute directly to the work of Impact Partners (co-funding) or support the work behind the Fund. Jump ahead to Get Involved for more details.
2.
Identifying opportunities for change
Australian Communities Foundation works with the Impact Fund community and civil society experts to identify priority issues and windows of opportunity for change across four Impact Areas: inequality, democracy, Indigenous self-determination, and the environment.
3.
Making change together
Once we identify an organisation or project working on a priority issue, Australian Communities Foundation commits funding from the Impact Fund, which is pooled with contributions from Impact Funders towards the Impact Partner’s work.
“The Impact Fund harnesses a collective process to identify worthwhile projects and bring together groups of donors to provide significant donations to organisations.”
Paul O’Shea (O’Shea-Thompson Fund), Impact Funder
“I like finding out about new opportunities for change and being able to come together with other funders to make it happen.”
Karen Mahlab AM, Impact Funder
The making of the Impact Fund
At Australian Communities Foundation, we recognise collective giving as a force for change.
That’s why, with the support of significant bequests, we launched the Impact Fund – to help more people give together and maximise their impact.

Types of grants
What types of work do Impact Funders support? There are many routes to positive systemic change. The Impact Fund community’s strongest focus to date has been on building public awareness of issues and advocating for policy change. This is closely followed by the community’s focus on building and strengthening social infrastructure. In addition, a quarter of work supported has focused on collaboration between different civil society groups.
Large Grants
Impact Funders join forces annually to give meaningful support to community organisations. These grants are often over several years, which gives our Partners much-needed stability, and usually range from $50,000 to $250,000.
Agile Grants
Impact Funders often step in to give rapid agile funding to urgent needs. We work hard to get agile funds out the door quickly so we can make full use of unexpected opportunities to advance a fairer and more sustainable Australia.
Impact Funders showed the power of collaboration during the Covid-19 pandemic, when they came together to support our cohort of Impact Partners to respond quickly to the fast-changing environment.
Types of grants
What types of work do Impact Funders support? There are many routes to positive systemic change. The Impact Fund community’s strongest focus to date has been on building public awareness of issues and advocating for policy change. This is closely followed by the community’s focus on building and strengthening social infrastructure. In addition, a quarter of work supported has focused on collaboration between different civil society groups.
Impact Funders join forces annually to give meaningful support to community organisations. These grants are often over several years, which gives our Partners much-needed stability, and usually range from $50,000 to $250,000.
Impact Funders often step in to give rapid agile funding to urgent needs. We work hard to get agile funds out the door quickly so we can make full use of unexpected opportunities to advance a fairer and more sustainable Australia.
Impact Funders showed the power of collaboration during the Covid-19 pandemic, when they came together to support our cohort of Impact Partners to respond quickly to the fast-changing environment.
“We are so grateful that Impact Funders understand the need to act when windows of opportunity arise to support positive reform, but also to respond when threats impact LGBTIQ+ people, women and other vulnerable communities.”
Anna Brown, CEO, Impact Partner Equality Australia
MAKING CHANGE TOGETHER
Next: Our Impact »
The making of the Impact Fund
At Australian Communities Foundation, we recognise collective giving as a force for change. That’s why, with the support of significant bequests, we launched the Impact Fund – to help more people give together and maximise their impact.
Key to the Fund’s success has been the strong foundations that were laid through initiatives like MacroMelbourne, which ran from 2003 until 2011.
“Our giving community has a strong history in supporting donors and NFPs to share knowledge and work together.”
“Through MacroMelbourne, our giving community has a strong history in supporting donors and NFPs to share knowledge and work together to tackle place-based disadvantage,” says Maree Sidey, CEO. “As part of our evolution to a national community foundation, we drew on the success of this history and applied a national lens.”
“We built on the momentum in the sector at the time and, with the support of globally respected leader Alison Taylor, then at Centre for Social Impact in New Zealand, developed the Impact Fund as one of the first national collective giving initiatives in Australia,” says Maree.
“We chose the Fund’s four focus areas – inequality, democracy, Indigenous self-determination, and the environment – because of the scale and entrenched nature of the challenges they present to our country.”
The Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC) was one of ACF’s early partners on the national stage with the release of $5,000 of funding to send the first lawyer to Manus Island. HRLC then became one of the first recipients of support from the Impact Fund for its work on marriage equality and abortion reform.
Hugh de Kretser, HRLC’s Executive Director, says that early support for advocacy and the subsequent emergence of the Impact Fund in 2017 was game-changing.
“What really struck me about the Impact Fund was the innovation, willingness and creativity to set something up that was able to respond to nationally significant opportunities for positive change.”