As the peak body we serve a community of funders, social investors and social change agents working to achieve positive social, cultural, environmental and community change by leveraging their financial assets and influence.
Informed, independent and with reach and credibility, Philanthropy Australia gives our members a collective voice and ability to influence and shape the future of the sector and advance philanthropy.
When developing our 2017-2020 strategic map, we had to balance our rich heritage with the ‘now’ and the future. We had to recognise the incredible expertise and resources of our traditional members and to their commitment to philanthropy. But we also needed to acknowledge that philanthropy was changing.
We needed to respond to the emergence of new types of philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, new ways of giving, new ways of investing corpus, changing and blurring relationships between "givers" and "receivers" and the growing realisation that the social sector were very much part of, in fact key players, in the philanthropic community - they have as much of an interest in our success as do the funders. We also understood that Corporates and intermediaries are critical to the success of our community.
Finally, key to the success of Philanthropy Australia’s future would be to change the way our supporters and members engage with us - we needed to democratise the existing membership model.
We held a number of consultations during 2015 and 2016 to determine how we can best partner with the philanthropic community to help create a better world together. Throughout this time, we continued to ask ourselves some key questions: Who do we serve? What is our purpose? What are the few things we are going to focus on and do really well? How do we harness the resources necessary to do those things? The resulting answers to these key questions form the basis of our strategic direction.
Our 2017-2020 Strategic Plan was launched by CEO, Sarah Davies, at our 2016 National Conference in Sydney.
As we are a membership organisation, our role is to service our members, but we’re also a peak body, and as such, we also have the role of advancing. These two roles are complementary because by promoting and growing philanthropy to create a better world, together with our members, we are actually fulfilling both of our roles.
Our purpose is to serve our members to achieve more and better philanthropy.
Funders: Give Where You Live Foundation and Geelong Community Foundation
For-purpose: Kids Thrive
Award partners: Australian Communities Foundation, Australian Community Philanthropy, Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal & Lord Mayor's Charitable Foundation.