The National Fund for Social Innovation Learning
We’re seeking funders committed to sector capability to create a $2.5m for social innovation learning - to unlock the capability Australia needs to navigate the 21st century.
Why?
The challenges of our time — climate change, social fragmentation, technology acceleration, extremism — demand we rethink how we live and how our public systems operate. They demand social innovation.
Social innovation practices — like co-design, social R&D, impact networks, and peer-to-peer — are proven ways to navigate complexity, unlock creativity, and shift power to people with lived experience.
Yet access to these practices in Australia is limited, and our ability to tackle complex problems remains underdeveloped.
We’re establishing a $2.5 million fund to scale access to social innovation skills — through scholarships, fellowships and new learning experiences for school aged children and professionals. And in parallel we are also exploring impact investing options to build the social innovation workforce.
The Future Wellness Accelerator
We’re seeking funders to join the partnership and fund a foundational year of activity to grow in community action to stem Australia’s mental health crisis.
Why?
The Future Wellness Accelerator is a new model developed through a unique conversation series that explored how Australia’s mental health has changed over the last 200 years.
The group included Aboriginal and multicultural leaders, practitioners and commissioners, many veterans of mental health reform. They agreed that we can only stem the growth of mental distress by working beyond the current boundaries of the service system: in homes, schools, online communities, clubs and media.
Now, with the model endorsed by mental health organisations, we're developing a group of funders to support a foundational year.
Current partners: Dana Shen, University of Sydney’s Mental Wealth Initiative, Roses in the Ocean, Centre for Policy Development, Social Health Australia, Centre for Relational Care, The Groove and Wellness Society Inc., Neami National, and Fay Fuller Foundation.
The Peer-to-Peer Initiative
We’re seeking partners and funders who see the potential of peer-to-peer, so we can increase the take-up of a low-cost, high-impact service type that enables people to support one another in ways professionals often can’t.
Why?
Over the past 15 years, TACSI has helped design 11 peer-based initiatives across four countries. These tackle eight major social challenges: child protection, gambling, family and domestic violence, ageing, mental health, palliative care, foster care, and justice.
The evidence is clear: peer models are cost-effective and capable of achieving outcomes professionals struggle to achieve alone. For example a quasi experimental trial of TACSI's Family by Family model (to be published in November) is showing a significant impact on out of home care admissions and visitations to the emergency department.
The potential of peer-to-peer responses to bridge the growing gaps between social fragmentation and overstretched service systems is enormous — yet they remain underused.
We’re looking for values-aligned partners to co-develop a national initiative that will scale up the use of peer-to-peer responses across Australia.
The National Futures Initiative
We’re seeking funders and partners to join our current focus areas (childhood, communities and human–machine collaboration) so that together, we can expand Australia’s sense of possibility and build pathways to a fairer future.
Why?
Many experts predict that the forces shaping the second quarter of the 21st century – climate change, extremism, and machine intelligence – will accelerate inequity and marginalisation, unless we choose to do something about it.
In response, with seed funding from the Paul Ramsay Foundation, we’ve started the National Futures Initiative. Our ambition is to create the opportunity and resources for individuals, communities and organisations to explore the future and inform the development of services, policies and systems that will shape it.
We’re looking for partners who want to:
Amplify our current work on the Future of Childhood and Future of Communities.
Support the creation of a network to explore the Future of Human/Machine collaboration.
Explore what a more just future would look like in relation to a particular theme or place.
The Impact Networks Initiative
We’re seeking funders committed to cross sector collaboration to support the take-up of an approach that helps unlock change across systems that would otherwise stay stuck.
Why?
Impact Networks create fertile ground for systems change by cultivating deep, authentic connections, shared understanding of complex systems, and collective intelligence.
Impact Networks can help unlock change across systems that would otherwise stay stuck, they are especially effective where outcomes are shaped by disconnected or cross-sector systems.
The practice of Impact Networks is highly developed in the USA and over the past six years TACSI, together with international collaborators, has been facilitating and evolving Impact Networks in Australia — improving the approach and contributing to the global conversation.
To date, we’ve facilitated networks focused on innovation in chronic conditions, end of life, housing and supported the creation of First Nations-led networks on Country, climate and health.
We’re now seeking partners to co-develop a national initiative that will expand the take-up of Impact Networks across Australia, build cross-sector capability and contribute to broad systems change.
Core funding for Australia’s national centre for social innovation
We’re looking for funders committed to innovation, sector capability and just transitions to contribute to core funding for Australia’s national center for social innovation - supporting us to scale our impact.
Why?
TACSI is currently 100% project funded. We’re seeking funders to back our core activities and support us to amplify the impact of what we do: serve the Australian for-purpose sector, help communities experiencing marginalisation, and make life better for future generations.
Over 15 years we have developed a stable financial model, but core funding would enable us to share more of what we do and more of what we are learning. A contribution to our operational costs would enable us to put more resourcing into areas of strategic growth including evidence creation, story telling, events and making a greater contribution to building the social innovation workforce.