The Wellington Community Trust has launched a new vision and granting framework. This is the culmination of months of work by the Board and staff as we make the shift towards a more strategic approach to our grant making.

We commissioned a piece of work from the Centre for Social Impact to help us better understand the areas of need emerging within our region. While Trustees, as representatives of the Wellington region, have a broad view of the issues in our region, this piece of work helped us to deepen our understanding and decide where our priorities as an organisation should be. As grant makers we are faced with the dilemma of receiving lots of applications for many worthy causes, but we can’t fund everything. Our new priorities provide the lens through which we make our funding decisions to help us achieve our vision of Active People, Resilient Communities and Sustainable Environments.

Some of the key changes we have made include the introduction of two types of general grants – Quick response: a quick and simple process for applications $5,000 and under; and Community Grants: larger grants with a more strategic focus. Our funding rounds will happen at different intervals throughout the year for each of these programmes.

We are also pleased to announce we’ve increased our grants budget in this financial year to $1,743,500 (this includes our Community Awards).

In addition to these key updates we remain committed to our multi-year funding programme (currently MY Children).

In line with these changes we’ve updated our online application system with the aim of making the process as simple and easy as possible. The Trust welcomes any feedback and the staff are on hand to answer any queries with this new system.

All the information about our granting programmes, application dates, and eligibility criteria can be found on our website; and our staff are on hand to answer any questions you may have.