The William Buckland Foundation
From PhilanthropyWiki
| |||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||
| Is this your organisation? Log in to edit if you are a Member, or Contact the Administrators with your amendments. | |||||||||||||||||||
When William Buckland died in November 1964 he was reputedly one of the wealthiest men in Australia. His estate was some $10 million at probate or $80 million in current dollars. The Foundation that bears his name has distributed more than $50 million for charitable purposes since its inception. It is one of the largest charitable foundations in Australia.
History
Funding Principles
The Foundation supports innovation in practice; strengthening the ability of not-for-profit bodies to deliver effective services to the community; and building knowledge within the not-for-profit sector and the wider community. In general, the Foundation supposrts larger projects or those which are likely to have a significant impact and consequently applications for grants of less than $20,000 are not preferred. Consideration may be given to more modest grants to evaluate projects or to enable dissemination of a successful model so that it can be replicated elsewhere. Grant funding is normally provided for one year only unless there are special reasons, such as sufficient time to test an innovative approach or to bring a new model to scale.
As a minimum, the Foundation requires programs to focus on the prevention of problems, addressing the causes of disadvantage rather than the symptoms. It also prefers programs that will make a significant contribution to the body of knowledge of the subject area or other positive impact on community wellbeing, especially for disadvantaged groups and rural communities. The Foundation has taken a broad interpretation of "public educational purposes" and "public scientific purposes".
The Foundation gives priority to programs that take innovative approaches to solving community problems, advance concepts to the demonstration stage or explore new fields of interest through research and development. Trustees are interested also in programs that are able to leverage financial support from, or in partnership with, other trusts and foundations, governments or others and those that are sustainable in the longer term.
Because the value of a new model is its ability to be replicated, the Foundation pays special attention to evaluation of programs, and to dissemination of their findings.
Sources
- The William Buckland Foundation Annual Report 2006
- Professor David Merrett's address at the launch of William Buckland's biography, 2005