Guidelines
Please read the program grant guidelines before you apply for a grant. The guidelines describe the funding program, who can apply, what you can apply for, the value of grants available, how to apply for funding and the grant holder requirements if your application is successful.
Guidelines for General Purpose Distribution grants, Short Stay Holiday grants and Noske Christmas grants are available via the JFA Purple Orange website.
How we make grants
Our grant making processes are governed by the deed of settlement for our funding, and the legal duties of our trustees. These determine what we can fund and our trustees’ obligations to follow due process when deciding which applications to support. Our values and strategy also guide our approach to grant making, and our decisions on which projects to support.
Principles
We apply the following principles to our grant making.
- Proportional
Our grant processes are designed to be proportional to the size and risk of the grant. This means we have a simpler application and grant making process for smaller grants, and more rigorous processes and terms and conditions for larger, more complex grants, and for those which we assess to be higher risk in terms of the likelihood of achieving the grant’s planned outcomes.
- Accessible applications
You can submit your application in the format that is most accessible for you. We include Word and PDF application forms on our website. Please contact us if you would rather submit your application in a different way – for example on a hard copy form, through a video or over the phone.
- Respectful
We will respect your privacy and your time throughout our grant processes. This means that we won’t ask for you for information that we do not need for the purposes of grant administration or decision making. Applications for grants for individuals are presented for decision on an anonymous basis.
- Developmental
Our grant processes are designed to support applicants to build capacity - by asking useful questions that promote new thinking, and by providing constructive feedback.
- Integrity and transparency
Our grant governance and operational management arrangements include provisions for reporting, recording and managing conflicts of interest, and for segregation of duties. No single person is responsible for grant decisions and information about our grant processes is included in these grant guidelines.
- Codesign
You do not have to wait until you have a fully developed grant proposal before you contact us. If you have an idea for a grant funded project, but want to test your thinking, or need some support to develop it, please contact us directly. We are happy to talk to you about your grant idea and if we think it’s a good fit for us, and to work with you on developing your proposal.
Assessment process
When you submit your application, we will check whether we have made any previous grants to you and if we have any existing relationship with you – outside your grant application. We will record this information in our assessment report, which will also describe any pre-application or codesign work with you leading up to your application. We do this to be fully transparent in the information we give to our trustees for decision making, to manage any real or perceived conflict of interests, and to make sure we separate any work we have done with you as a stakeholder from the consideration of your application.
Your application will be sent to a member of our independent panel. These are a group of experienced grants professionals, external to the Julia Farr group. They will assess your application against the funding criteria described below and make a recommendation to our trustees.
Our trustees will review your application and the assessment report and decide whether to award or decline your grant request. We will inform you of the trustees’ decision and, if you are not successful, we will give the reasons for the decision not to support your application. Please note that the trustees administer the grant funds at their discretion and their decision is final.
Decision making criteria
In reviewing applications for funding, our trustees are guided by the following criteria:
- Eligibility: does our deed of settlement allow us to fund these activities?
- Fit with strategy: does this grant support our strategic objectives?
- Outcomes: do the planned or likely outcomes of this grant demonstrate benefit to the disability community, within the focus area of the grant program?
- Confidence: does the application give confidence that the outcomes are likely to be achieved?
- Financial: do we have sufficient funds to support this application; does the application represent value for money?
- No double funding: Does government have a responsibility for funding this activity? Is another agency already funding this work?
Grant management
If you are awarded a grant, you will need to sign our grant agreement. We will ask you to provide progress reports and financial acquittals on a staged basis throughout the grant, and at the end of the grant.
Grant payments are generally made in equal, quarterly instalments in advance, against a payment and reporting schedule.
Evaluation and impact measurement
We will arrange for an independent evaluation of the grant program that includes consideration of the program’s social impact. You will be required to participate in the evaluation as a condition of your grant, and to consent to publication of learning from your project.
Operational management and key contact
We will assign one of our team to work you as an Application Consultant, to assist your application move through the key stages to a trustee decision. The Application Consultant is not responsible for assessing your grant application once it is lodged, or making decisions on whether or not the grant application will be funded.
If you are awarded a grant, we will assign a Grant Recipient Consultant to work with you through grant management and reporting.