About Our Grants for Social Enterprises
We're proud to invest in social enterprises with a proven model for job creation to support people facing barriers to mainstream employment.
What's in this article:
- How we support social enterprises
- How we choose social enterprises
- Which social enterprises are eligible?
- Social enterprises we support
How we support social enterprises
By investing in a supporting employment-focused community organisations and social enterprises, our mission is to help create 10,000 jobs by 2030.
Since 2006, Westpac Foundation has been working with social enterprises to help them scale and create more jobs and training opportunities for people facing barriers to mainstream employment.
How we choose social enterprises
We provide multi-year grants of approximately $100,000 per year to help social enterprises with a proven model for job creation transition to their next stage of growth -
these are by invitation only from our existing inclusive Employment grant partners.
We also seek to collaborate with other funders on our multi-year grants. An example is the
WISE Grant which is managed by Lord Mayor's Charitable Foundation.
See our latest
Impact Report (PDF 7MB) for a list of our partner Social Enterprises.
Which social enterprises are eligible?
Our focus
We focus on the early stages of social enterprise development including "
validation," "
development," and "
growth". We do not fund "vision" (start-up) or "established" social enterprises.
Social enterprise stage | Description |
---|---|
Vision | The ideation or start-up stage. |
Validation | An early-stage social enterprise that is still establishing its financial and business stability. The business is operating or trading (earned over $50k in trading income in the last 12 months) but is still reliant on grants with trading revenue less that 50% total revenue). |
Development | A stable social enterprise that is building its financial and business stability. Trading income is a significant component (over 50%) of total revenue. The business goal is to be self-sustainable (excluding Impact Costs), and focused on diversifying income streams. |
Growth | A financially sustainable social enterprise with a viable business model considering growth options and interest in attracting impact investment in the next few years. They may still require funding to manage impact costs. |
Established | Commercially viable with opportunity for further growth. |
Organisation type
We focus on organisations that:
- Are seeking to strengthen their business model, build greater financial resilience and sustainability in delivering their social mission.
- Would benefit from non-financial capacity-building support in addition to the grant.
- Have a long-term strategy to build its business models to transition over time to attract traditional finance and impact investment.
Social enterprises we support
Green Connect
Creates jobs for resettled refugees and young people in the Illawarra region (NSW) through keeping waste out of landfill, composting and growing chemical-free food.
Australian Spatial Analytics
Australian Spatial Analytics is a strengths-based social enterprise that employs young autistic adults to do high quality data analysis for businesses and governments.