Trust-Based Funding: Investing in organisational strength for better community outcomes

What would it look like to fund an organisation’s own strategic priorities, giving them the freedom to decide where and how resources are allocated, and helping them to build their own capacity instead of funding prescribed project deliverables? And if you did, what would you expect to change?

For anyone who designs, funds or oversees government or philanthropic grants, come to this webinar to hear from the funder, the Victorian Legal Services Board + Commissioner and the independent evaluator at Allen + Clarke who will unpack how to understand whether the grant is achieving impact and what evidence you might want to put in front of a Minister, a Board or a community to demonstrate that impact.  

You’ll hear from both the funder and the evaluator and leave with early evidence of what trust-based funding does for the organisations that receive it, plus an evaluation framework you can take back to your own agency.

What you’ll learn:

• Why funding an organisation’s strategy, not a project, matters, and what leaders did with the time and space it created

• How to evaluate a grant program when funding isn’t tied to prescribed deliverables, using a framework co-designed with grantees

• What changes inside an organisation when grantees direct funding to their own priorities, from financial resilience to advocacy capacity, including gains grantees hadn’t planned for

• How funding design shapes outcomes for communities, from the features grantees valued most to where project-based funding was unlikely to deliver the same results

• How to use this evidence to inform your own grant-making or strategy, including where it is still early or mixed

Perfect for policy teams, program leads, senior executives, government and philanthropic funders who design, fund or oversee grants and anyone responsible for funding strategy.