Westpac Foundation
Funding priorities
The Westpac Foundation supports not-for-profit organisations with deductible gift recipient status throughout Australia. Through our grants, we seek to develop communities where the long-term unemployed, Indigenous Australians, refugees, the homeless, and individuals with a disability, feel engaged and included.
If you are interested in applying for funding for 2012, please review our application process.
Funding social enterprise and innovation
We will continue to fund new ideas, put to paper by the visionaries in our community who seek to change the status quo. They are agents of change with ideas that drive lasting social impact, can be sustained, and may be replicated across regions.
The ideas must be enterprising and innovative. They must not only improve the community but also have the potential to generate income so that the initiative can fully or partly fund itself in the future. In this way, its impact is sustained. Such a project is commonly called a “social enterprise”.
Another focus is investing in the “infrastructure” of not-for-profits to help gear them up to put in place commercial activities within their organizations.
Our funding of social enterprise and innovation involves larger grants, the minimum size is $50,000, and they may be given once or up to three years in a row.
Funding community
From 2012 we will fund community initiatives through local grants through the support of the Branch and Commercial Bank employees of our major supporter, Westpac Banking Corporation.
These smaller grants from $10,000 will make a difference at the grassroots, through connecting Westpac employees with their local communities. The support goes beyond financial assistance, to the offer of volunteers and business expertise.
