Impact100 Melbourne is part of the network of Impact100 giving circles across Australia. The organisation is run by a diverse group of Melburnians who are passionate about local issues and how to make Melbourne a great city for all residents. Impact100 Melbourne is hosted by the Greater Melbourne Foundation.
The Impact100 model aims to democratise philanthropy by gathering 100 donations of $1000 to make one large grant of $100,000 for maximum impact. The group democratically decides where the funds will deliver the biggest social change.
“If you add up all the giving circles around the country, there's probably a few thousand people at any one time that are active members,” Advisory Committee Member, Rikki Andrews, says.
“And then there are thousands of others who have been through the process and aren't active right now. That's a lot of people who we’ve brought on the journey to increase their giving.”
Each year, Impact100 Melbourne focuses on a social issue to direct its grants. This has previously included homelessness and supporting diversity in the Melbourne community. However, the organisation also drives awareness of important social issues by providing educational opportunities for their members around how their grant will bring about significant change.
Rikki Andrews: Like many others, we were inspired by James Boyd who studied the Impact100 model in the US and subsequently started one in Western Australia.
After hearing him speak, a few of us were really inspired and decided to do a Melbourne version. There were eight on the starting committee and most of us had worked in the philanthropic sector either as wealth advisors, grant makers or Philanthropy Australia staff. We all scurried around to get things underway and were very fortunate to have support from JBWere who hosted several of our events. Having a committee of people who understood philanthropy was great, but having a corporate supporter that could help champion our work helped so much.
We followed the same format as the WA and Fremantle groups and it was a year-long process of engaging members, having events and learning about the issues that were relevant for Melbourne. Members would get involved through our grant making process. Our grant committee included people in the philanthropic sector who were very experienced and helped us create structure and rigour around the process.
We have certainly had challenges along the way. Covid really impacted our giving. We were operating as a volunteer group when Melbourne headed into lockdown and because so many committee members were women, they suddenly had additional commitments with learning from home, family issues, losing jobs, becoming unwell, and looking after elderly parents. When we’re talking about women's giving, women give to lots of things and it’s always on top of family commitments. It’s still a challenge to source committed donors and volunteers who have that time and capacity to give.
However, despite the challenges, we’ve had amazing impact. There are organisations that we can point to and know that our grant was the galvanizer. Mainly because they were at a stage where an extra $100,000 allowed them to create a big strategic piece or employ a significant staff member.
Rikki Andrews: For the first few years, most of the people involved were within our network and were mainly 35–50-year-old professionals. Even if they didn’t work in the philanthropic sector, they came from families or went to schools where that giving was a known factor. Some were fortunate enough to have parents who had set up a foundation, so they got involved to learn about what organisations were out there, in a relatively anonymous way.
Many of them took the learning experience each year from the organisations they met and the issues that they learned about and then made significant donations directly to those organisations the following year. The benefit of a giving circle is that it provides people with a learning opportunity, and you never know where they will take that or the impact it will have.
Beyond the monetary contributions, these organisations repeatedly talk about the sense of community that they feel. The connections and relationships they’ve made through Impact100 have resulted in people joining their boards and helping with a corporate sponsorship.
In terms of members, a big turning point for us was when we were part of a feature story in The Age, and this was back in the old days when it was a broad sheet. Lots of women responded to that article and became members that year, and even if they had no idea about giving and philanthropy, they were inspired to do something.
Rikki Andrews: Watching new people go through the process and understand that for some of us, one thousand dollars, is not actually hard. It’s shifted their level of giving and given them the confidence that they can be significant givers, and it's not just the realm of the AFR Rich list.
So that's impact. Getting new people on board, especially younger people who realise that they have capacity to give now rather than waiting until retirement. It’s great when we come across people we met in the first couple of years and five or six years later, they’re significant funders and volunteers. They would not have had that experience or exposure to these organisations if they hadn't come through the Giving Circle.
The other impact is when you look back on a particular collective decision and what that enabled a not-for-profit to do. The first grant we gifted was $100,000 to an organisation that used it to employ a director to help with strategy. At the time they were volunteer-based and now they are a registered independent school that provides tailored education for young women, largely from Africa, who've come here as refugees and migrants.
I think we can say, that if we hadn't provided that money and additional resources like volunteers and a board member, they might not have had the same impact that they do now.
Rikki Andrews: You need to recognise the limits of your own ability to continue volunteering. And you need to have a succession plan. Something that doesn’t get spoken about much is how important diversity is for your volunteer starting groups. Aside from all the other benefits, it safeguards you from all getting hit with the same big things at the same time.
Five years in, we all got promotions, we were all having kids, raising families and then we started dealing with aging parents. Because we were all dealing with the same things, we lost momentum because nobody had time or brain space. Diversity is important to keep everything moving.
One thing I wish I'd had more headspace for is driving connections. Through the work I do, I meet lots of people who end up moving interstate. For instance, there was one woman who moved to WA, and I suggested she chat to 100 Women and check out Impact100. I made the connections and next thing I know, she's on one of the committees which meant she had an instant network that she could use professionally as well.
That's something we can really build on down the track. To support women and grow that awareness that if you have to move to Melbourne professionally or as a family, there are instant networks of like-minded people that you can join.
Rikki Andrews: I want us to keep on going because it’s the best way to get new people, particularly women, involved in giving and learning about a range of community issues. This means that we provide better giving because people are more aware of these issues. They start making different decisions and having different conversations outside their giving conversations.
We saw the impact of this in our second year. Our theme was around homelessness, and I would sit in sessions with people that I considered quite worldly and well-informed, and they were asking the most basic of questions around homelessness because they just didn’t see it. But that process helped them get a much clearer understanding of the many factors that might result in someone being homeless.
I would like to see people’s awareness around different issues grow and for us to start thinking about how these issues affect genders differently. We can't just assume that the male is the default option, we have to understand why these issues might be different for women and start making more thoughtful decisions.
