Established in 2014 as Melbourne Women’s Fund, Melbourne Women’s Foundation is a Giving Circle uniting member and donor resources to aid not for profit organisations in Melbourne addressing the challenges affecting women and their families.
Supported by a wonderful group of women who volunteer their smarts, energy and time, the Melbourne Women’s Foundation is committed to creating “a future where vulnerable women and families in Melbourne thrive.”
“Our volunteer leaders give so much of their time running all aspects of MWF from growing our base of members and coming up with inspiring and informative events that bring everyone together, to carefully evaluating not for profits who can deliver on our mission for women and families in need,” said Co-Founder Patricia Burke OAM. “You can’t do something like this alone.”
The aim of the grants program is to boost the ability of a not for profit (often a smaller, grassroots organisation) to effect change that actively improves the wellbeing of women or women with families living in greater Melbourne. Over the ten years since inception, the grants focus areas have most consistently included family violence, homelessness, and employment and economic empowerment. This year mental health is included as a cause area as well.
“I believe that part of our job is to take the sobering news and data from the community, such as the rise in family violence incidents over the past two years, and then encourage our donors not to give up. It’s important for us to share the positive stories of the lives that have been helped through our giving circle and in so doing, influence our donors and supporters to keep trying,” says Pat.
For this group of women, the joy of working and giving together is what drives them to keep showing up to make a difference.
Gillian Hund OAM and I worked together in partnership to launch the fund in 2014. We were both inspired by Colleen Willoughby, a leader in collective giving who co-founded the Washington Women's Foundation in the United States, over 30 years ago. In 2013 she was here on a speaking tour to help grow women’s giving in Australia by the Australian Women Donors Network (now AIIW), and Gillian and I were lucky to spend time with Colleen and benefit from her advice and inspiration.
We’ve stayed in contact with Colleen over the years and she was instrumental in providing advice and encouragement to help us launch. When we started the Melbourne Women’s Fund, Gillian and I were both new to philanthropy. We had come from other careers and met as mature age students at Swinburne studying for our master’s degrees in social investment and philanthropy.
We were also lucky from the beginning to have the mentorship and guidance of senior Melbourne-based philanthropic women leaders on our advisory board, including Catherine Brown OAM, former CEO of Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation. These great women provided incredibly valuable early advice from governance to grant making, and they encouraged many of our first members to join.
In 2014, when we launched, we were the first sub-fund to hold a collective giving group at the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation. Catherine and her team’s guidance and backroom administrative support gave us the opportunity to focus on the joy of giving and on building our membership. We were very excited to launch with about 70 members who enabled us to make inaugural grants to not-for-profits with $81,000 in that first year.
In the 10 years since then, we have awarded $1.14 million in grants and grown a foundation corpus with Life Member donations for our long-term future. It’s been an exciting time since becoming an independent charity last year with our first employed CEO and our name change to the Melbourne Women’s Foundation. Having grown to about 150 members strong, we are on track to grant $165,000 in November which is amazing and a testament to our generous supporters, given it’s such a tough donor market.
The way we work is that generous women leaders give their time, pro-bono, to help run the giving circle, and we run on a very low budget. You will find a similar story with other giving circles – there is often a key, enthusiastic person or two who start it, which inspires other people to get involved and volunteer their time, talent, treasure and ties.
From the beginning we’ve had fantastic volunteer leaders who have given more time than we could count helping to run our events, build our membership, help with marketing, comms and the website, and devote the deep thinking needed on our grants committee. Today’s Melbourne Women’s Foundation stands on the shoulders of our decade of volunteer leaders and generous donors!
So many of these women opened their many networks to invite others to get involved too. They tell us they have built new friendships and valuable connections, and many have become volunteers or board members of the numerous not for profit organisations we have granted funding. There are many positive ripple effects to giving collectively – it would be great to try to capture the impact of giving circle’s funding and the multiple positive effects they’ve created across Australia.
Along the way, someone gave me the unofficial title of Chief Inspirer, which made me smile because when you are part of leading something as special as the Melbourne Women’s Foundation, it’s easy to feel inspired. I hope that because I'm enthusiastic about this work, other people can feel that joy and it influences them to be involved too.
I think it’s the same thing that keeps everybody connected - the joy of giving together. I tend to get excited when we come together for our many events and catch ups. A good example is our annual event where the not for profits who received the previous year’s grants stand in front of our members and share impactful stories of how their grant funds were used, what worked, and how women’s lives were helped. Sharing these human stories keeps the flame going for us and for our supporters.
Currently I am chairing our board and helping to steer the organisation through an exciting phase as a new charity. Our mission and focus remains strong and clear, and we are lucky to have a talented, dedicated board and CEO with loyal volunteer leaders delivering on our mission and bringing us into our second decade of giving together. It’s wonderfully inspiring work all around and I’m grateful to be part of it.
A key bit of research I have learned is that women like to focus their giving at the grassroots level, that women are natural collaborators and learn at a connected level about causes to which they give. These are ideal characteristics for coming together in collective groups to pool their donations of time and treasure to change society for the better.
A highlight is knowing that more giving circles and collective giving groups are forming and many of the existing ones are growing across Australia; many are place-based like ours and focused on helping key beneficiary groups like women and their families, or are cause-based, such as for climate and environment.
We have learned so much since starting in 2014, and we continue to take inspiration from leading organisations in the USA and here as well.
If we boil down what giving circles are actually about – it is the buzz we get when we give and learn together, and when our donations are greatly magnified in a larger, more impactful pool with wonderful people who share our concerns and ambitions to help others.
My ambitions for the future are around the influence of women. We are half the population and early indications are that 65% of intergenerational wealth transfer is coming to women. As a well-educated nation with generous women who make smart decisions with warm hands and warm hearts, won’t it be interesting to see what those women do philanthropically with their inherited wealth? I want to see women’s giving and philanthropy grow, and I will continue to do what I can to influence more Australian women to give.
Personally, I'll continue my giving through Melbourne Women's Foundation and donate my time and treasure as part of a this close-knit collective. But as someone who's now an elder in the group—and as a co-founder who's been there from the beginning—I am handing the baton on to a wonderful new generation of women who are leading it with their smarts, energy and time. I want to continue to do what I can to mentor and support them to succeed in their mission to create a future where Melbourne’s women and families in need can thrive.
