From the CEO

It’s been a whirlwind first few months with our new strategy hitting the road and the Trustees have already approved over $1 million worth of grants to biodiversity conservation and educational equity.

We have been very excited to get underway with this work and one of the more rewarding things about a change in direction and focus are the meaningful conversations you start to have with organisations doing incredibly important work for the future of our state. We have some great initiatives we are supporting and I will continue to share these with you and I can’t wait to announce more in our next edition. 

Our team is back from a visit to Canberra for the Philanthropy meets Parliament Summit, where we had some timely reminders of the importance of democracy and advocating for the rights and needs of civil society.

For those of us fortunate enough to work in the philanthropy sector, one of our aims is to ensure the voices of those who wouldn’t otherwise be heard, get to send their messages to our elected representatives. To that end we were very proud to be featured as part of Philanthropy Australia’s new advocacy toolkit. You can read more below.

Speaking of advocacy, our Trustees this week approved a further commitment of $50,000 towards the incredibly important Raise the Rate campaign. The Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) is driving the campaign and we needed to look no further than the media coverage during Anti-Poverty Week to see something needs to change.

The ACOSS campaign goal is to get the Federal Government to lift the base rate of Newstart and other allowances by at least $75 per week, and index allowances to wages so that these payments do not fall so far behind community living standards in the future.

This is a great example of a coordinated advocacy campaign working from the grassroots up to the highest levels of sophisticated negotiation with our elected representatives.

For us there is a clear link between our educational equity theory of change and ensuring people have enough money to live and engage meaningfully with society, education and, if possible, work. How can you engage and perform at school, if you don’t have enough to eat or stable housing? This is an important and ongoing community conversation and we hope others put their weight behind the campaign also.

If you have any feedback on the work we are doing or on our new strategy, website or processes, please let us know – feedback helps us remain connected to your work and allows us to make improvements.

Sarah Hardy
CEO, the Ross Trust