We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Custodians of the lands and waterways on which we work and live across Australia and to Elders of the past, present, and into the future.
We acknowledge their care over these lands for millennia and commit to remembering that the ground beneath our feet is infused with wisdom, stories, and songs that reach beyond our knowing.
We are committed to collaboration that furthers self-determination. As we go forward, we will continue to listen, learn, and be allies for a healing future.
We are delighted to share our 2024 Impact and Learning Summary, which shares our reflections and insights from working in a principle-led approach with community and the change and impact this enabled. There were many significant moments to commemorate for 2024, and we look forward to continuing to build on these learnings and momentum this year.
In 2024, we evolved into the Fay Fuller Foundation group by launching the Fay Fuller Community Health Foundation alongside the Fay Fuller Family Foundation. This holistic grouped approach, positions us to put community dollars into community hands more quickly and with fewer administrative and reporting burdens, particularly for partners without DGR status.
The year also marked five years of partnership with Our Town communities and movement into the midpoint of the initiative in 2025. Our Town continues to grow in strength, deepen its learnings and stands as a wonderful example of community-led, place-based work, at a time when interest in this approach has culminated in the establishment of PLACE, a federal government-backed organisation.
In 2024, Adelaide hosted the largest-ever Philanthropy Australia conference, drawing over 1,000 attendees. This landmark event showcased exceptional community-led organisations across the state and created new opportunities for collaboration. It also marked the official launch of Spinifex Foundation SA—South Australia's first Indigenous-led fund—one of Fay Fuller’s long-term partnering developments. Leading up to the launch, we had the privilege of traveling with Spinifex Foundation SA representatives to New Zealand, where we immersed ourselves in culture and possibility, learning from Māori-led philanthropic and for-purpose organisations.
Finally, as the year closed, we began exploring the possibilities of the next 5–7 years for Fay Fuller by reflecting on our learnings and impact with the community—a process we look forward to sharing more about and inviting people to contribute to in the coming months.
While metrics aren’t able to fully tell the story of our impact and the impact of our partners’ work, they do provide a snapshot of some important numbers for this year.
$2,887,986 Granted
Community work doesn’t happen according to a financial or calendar year and our granting cycles reflect this. We have partners starting and finishing work at different times, many of whom we partner with for multiple years.
36 Grant Partners
The above data represents two partial financial years and accounts for committed funds, and active partnerships within the calendar year. Grants have been allocated according to a primary focus area, however many of our grants are intersectional e.g. previously, some of our Mental Health grants have supported Aboriginal Community Controlled organisations. These figures account for funds transferred to support the development and granting of Spinifex Foundation SA in the calendar year, but don't account for total funds held on their behalf.
Fay Fuller Foundation's Year in Grantmaking
Holding Community at the heart of everything we do, our priority is to support conditions where communities are empowered to make decisions based on their needs and assume ownership in driving future focused change.
Our grantmaking is unique in several ways
The Foundation’s grantmaking encompasses a range of funding types, with the shared intention of supporting the conditions for community-determined approaches to promote wellbeing across South Australia. These partnerships and grants include long-term initiatives, shorter-term explorative opportunities, as well as responsive and collaborative funding.
Our granting practice hopes to support the community to have the resources and freedom to understand from their perspective what it means to be and stay well, and discover what might aid in supporting this. Read more about our approach to Mental Health and Wellbeing here.
We prioritise the change our partners are working towards, creating the conditions for our partners to be flexible and evolve their work with the community as they go. Essential to this is prioritising building relationships and creating space for the journey of learning to emerge over predetermined deliverables or outcomes.
We work alongside our partners to understand the ripples of change that occur along the way and support them in pursuing advocacy and influencing opportunities connecting them across our networks where possible.
Internally and with our partners, we listen and learn alongside the community and use reflective practices to inform future strategies that pave the path towards long-term change.
Read more about our trust based granting practice here.
What this looked like in 2024
In 2024, our grantmaking continued to be invested in understanding and building pathways for person-centred approaches to preventative mental health and the conditions for wellbeing.
This involved ongoing partnerships with 2022 Discovery and 2023 Spark Partners, the commencement of three new Discovery partnerships, and the introduction of a new Strategic Partnership. In 2024, by virtue of our networks and relations we were able to extend additional support to some of our existing partners and to several community-born local movements outside of our public grant rounds.
Our Town teams continued evolving their individual approaches to building regenerative capabilities, creating ways for community to support community and deep culture change. Imagining and progressing the collective power and voice of Our Town as a Network was a focus; sharing their learnings, practice and evidence to support each other and influence broader, long-term change.
2024 saw the First Nations Philanthropic Funding Working Group (FNPFWG) transition into an independent organisation, Spinifex Foundation SA. Across the year this development continued to bring together First Nations community members who provided invaluable support and resources to inform the Spinifex Foundation SA team and its future ways of working with Fay Fuller playing a support role.
The FNPFWG Story of Place grants continued in 2024, creating small yet meaningful ripples through 14 communities across South Australia. These engagements have sparked ideas for extending projects to foster broader community involvement, cultivating a renewed belief in the power of community-led initiatives.
Partner feature: MCCSA Men's Mental Health Connectors program
Our partnership with MCCSA began through their Discovery work on the Men’s Mental Health Connectors program, a partnership with four multicultural men's groups exploring mental health and wellbeing within their own community contexts. This collaboration deepened our shared understanding of the need for community-led approaches to support diverse communities and contributed to a clearer articulation for MCCSA of the protective factors that contribute to wellbeing in diverse cultures. For the men involved, it opened new conversations and built confidence in supporting one another.
This journey, learnings and community voice has been captured through a video and we encourage you to watch it for a true understanding of this project’s impact and the conditions that enabled it. We extend our deepest gratitude to the community partners; Kabudu Men's Club, Australians for Syria, the Latino American Society of SA, and the Burundian community.
“Over the past two years, I’ve seen the power of trusting CALD communities to lead their own solutions—true resilience is built when people are empowered to define their own paths to healing.” Ukash Ahmed
In 2024, MCCSA transitioned from a Discovery Grant Partner into a two-year Strategic partnership with the Foundation. The partnership will focus on three key areas for change:
Creating spaces for community connection that foster wellbeing and provide pathways for preventative mental health approaches.
Enhancing inclusivity and accessibility, ensuring systems and services meet the needs of our diverse community.
Advocating for more flexible and sustainable funding to support long-term, proactive approaches rather than short-term crisis responses.
As multicultural diversity becomes the new mainstream in South Australia, the work of MCCSA in creating an equitable and thriving multicultural society, and empowering diverse communities to shape South Australia's economic, political, social, and cultural landscape - is more vital than ever.
Progressing our Reconciliation Action Plan
Year one of implementing our RAP has been inspiring, grounding, and has challenged us to reflect on every aspect of our organisation—from our internal workings to our external relationships and partnerships.
Throughout this year we’ve had a few key learnings along the way that are influencing how we understand and approach the work of putting our RAP into action in a way that feels genuine, meaningful and in alignment with how we approach all of our work and partnerships.
Doing this well takes time and consideration
Relationships are the work
The true work of Reconciliation won’t be found in your RAP, but your RAP will help get you there
To read more about these learnings and the progress of our Innovate RAP read our progress report here.
Our approach to evaluation strongly focuses on understanding how we are showing up as a partner, how our partners are going about their work, and our collective contributions to shared goals.
Informed by data collected through internal and partner impact logs, interviews with grant partners, informal check-ins, and stories shared with us, our end of year collective sense-making session identified hotspots on our Theory of Change where there was strong evidence of impact. In comparison to last year, we have moved further along our Theory of Change - with clusters of evidence sitting firmly in the longer term outcomes, and contributing to our strategic aims.
Read more about our SIML framework development and review our Theory of Change here.
resources flowing to community priorities
increase to range of tailored responses
funders adopting similar practices
Resources flowing to community identified priorities
We provide generally untied grant funding to many of our partners and in turn across 2024 we saw many of our partners working closely with their communities to understand where and how that funding should best be deployed.
By moving decisions around funding into the hands of community we see this being directed towards the small things that can really make a big difference and the removal of barriers to activate ideas and possibility.
Resources flowing to community identified priorities
We provide generally untied grant funding to many of our partners and in turn across 2024 we saw many of our partners working closely with their communities to understand where and how that funding should best be deployed.
By moving decisions around funding into the hands of community we see this being directed towards the small things that can really make a big difference and the removal of barriers to activate ideas and possibility.
Community members having the choice to access a range of local, tailored responses
In 2023, one of our key impact areas was ‘new parts of community seeing a path to get involved in developing new responses’. In 2024 we saw the progression of this change pathway to an increase in the range of tailored responses available to community.
This was evident across our longer term partnerships from Our Town to Discovery, with the demonstration of what is possible when community are connected and resourced and encouraged to work towards their own priorities and opportunities. In some instances this involved connecting community members and groups to existing services and information, and in other instances it has involved adapting or developing their own preventative supports.
Funders hearing about the work directly from us and engaging with our learnings and evidence/ Funders adopting similar practices
We continued to see strong evidence around this pathway - due partly to our ability to accurately track this - but we also saw an increase of our partners sharing their work, learnings and evidence with others.
Additionally, we started to see some evidence moving along this pathway to instances where funders adopted similar practices and inferred that this was as a result of interactions with the Foundation.
Key Learnings and
what they mean for
us in 2025
Each year we collate our key learnings based on the year’s reflection and consider as a team what this means for our work in the year to come, building on our learnings from years before.
Our key learnings from 2024 are reflective of the process of continuous growth that the Foundation has been on, alongside our partners and community over the past five years. In 2024, we started to consider how we might continue to evolve our role and strategy, informed by building on our principles and foundations. The key learnings below reflect this future thinking, and the recognition that there are ways that community are asking for our role to expand, change, and opportunities to deepen our partnerships.
These learnings will guide us in the design phase of our new strategy with the community in 2025.
Key learning No1
The Foundation’s role in change-making is evolving, and our approaches to creating impact are increasingly diverse.
This has been observed through the different types of roles, partnerships and relationships we have engaged in the last year. We have been inspired by what we have heard from community, and by our growth, learnings and insights from past work.
What we’re doing about it
We will hold the importance of us being open to opportunities, and our ability to adapt to changing needs and priorities when driven by intention and community voice.
Key learning No2
Our consistency and continuity in this work through our culture, ethos, practice, and being grounded in our principles is meaningful and a key enabler of our impact.
Informed by a reflection on what has contributed to the trust, depth of collaboration, and openness we have been able to cultivate with partners and sectors and how this enables shared growth and new opportunities.
What we’re doing about it
We will hold this as central to who the Foundation is and how we work when looking to the future and evolving.
Key learning No3
Future strategies and commitments need to be grounded in community context, reality and capacity.
There is excitement in being able to act on what we have learnt and developed to expand and deepen our role, but it is essential to ensure that our future evolution continues to be tied to and informed by community.
What we’re doing about it
We will be engaging community in the development of our future strategic evolution, including how our ways of working and making decisions might evolve to be more community determined.
Key learning No4
Being an active participant in community change helps us to understand where we fit and enables us to be more responsive.
We view our role within the broader ecosystems of community change, and reflect on what roles communities are asking us to play, how we can work in collaboration and what we have to contribute and learn alongside others.
What we’re doing about it
It is important for us to hold through our strategic conversations that our role may need to evolve or change over time, as broader contexts change, and although it is important to plan for a future where our role isn’t needed, we need to play an active role in creating that future.