Acknowledgement of Country
We acknowledge that these offices sit on the lands of the Kaurna People and that they have been and continue to be the custodians of this place.
We commit to remembering that the ground beneath our feet is infused with wisdom, stories, and songs that reach beyond our knowing. We are committed to collaboration that furthers self-determination and as we go forward we will continue to listen, learn, and be allies for a healing future.
We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations Peoples and pay our respects to Elders of the past, present and into the future.
The work of prevention, promotion and creating the conditions for wellbeing asks something unusual of funders.
Often, we are trying to evidence something that did not happen and hopefully may never happen if we undertake our role well.
A person who found connection before needing to reach a system for support. A community that held space for its members when systems could not.
These are powerful outcomes, but they are difficult to measure through traditional lenses of impact.
For that reason, we as a Foundation focus strongly on the indicators of change that emerge from community itself. We look for the early signals that wellbeing is strengthening – people coming together, new local leadership emerging, stories and narratives shifting from deficit to strengths-based, or communities finding the confidence to act on the issues that matter most to them.
Communities recognise these changes first. They hold the knowledge of what the conditions for positive wellbeing look like in their place, among their people and within their culture.
Our role as a Foundation is not to impose measurement approaches that reassure us we are doing our jobs well, but to listen carefully and learn alongside our partners about what these signals mean.
This requires intentionality; it is easy to fall into measuring what can be counted, rather than what is meaningful to change. Across the Foundation we aim to avoid producing outputs that may look impressive on paper or in charts but say little about the real conditions shaping people’s lives.
Instead, we focus on understanding the deeper ripples of change that occur when communities are trusted and supported to lead.
I remain deeply grateful to the communities we work alongside for their wisdom, and to everyone across the Foundation who holds the space to truly listen and learn.
By the numbers
Numbers are not the heart of impact. But we recognise that it is important for funders to be transparent about where we distribute community resources.
In 2025, we granted $3,491,628 to 41 partners.
Community work doesn’t happen according to a financial or calendar year and our granting cycles reflect this. We have partners starting and finishing work at different times, many of whom we partner with for multiple years.
The above data represents two partial financial years and accounts for committed funds, and active partnerships within the calendar year.
Our grants are allocated to a primary focus area, however many of our grants intersect with multiple areas. For example, our Mental Health and Wellbeing grants may support work in First Nations communities; and Practice and Collaboration grants have contributed learnings and knowledge into the Our Town initiative.
Taken together, all of our grant making aims to contribute towards long-term community wellbeing.
Our year in grant making
Holding community at the heart of everything we do, our priority is to support conditions where communities are empowered to make decisions based on their needs and assume ownership in driving future focused change.
Our approach to grant making
Our grants encompass a range of funding types, with the shared intention of supporting the conditions for community-determined wellbeing approaches across South Australia. These include long-term initiatives, shorter-term explorative opportunities, as well as responsive and collaborative funding.
We prioritise the change our partners are working towards, creating the conditions for our partners to be flexible and evolve their work with communities as they go.
We work alongside our partners to understand the ripples of change that occur along the way and support them in pursuing advocacy and influencing opportunities, connecting them across our networks where possible.
Internally and with our partners, we listen and learn with community and use reflective practices to inform future strategies that start paving the path towards long term change. Read more about our trust-based granting practice here.
What that looked like in 2025
Our grant making continued around our three focus areas: Mental Health and Wellbeing, First Nations-led Health and Wellbeing, and Practice and Collaboration.
During the year, we commenced six new Spark partnerships and continued our relationships with 2024 Discovery partners and our Strategic Partnership with Multicultural Communities Council of SA (MCCSA). We continued our support for several community-born local movements, and partners working to embed learnings from previous Spark or Discovery grants within their communities. By virtue of our networks and relationships, we were able to provide responsive support to existing and new partners through discrete funding outside public rounds.
The Our Town initiative reached an important milestone: the midpoint of its 10-year journey. Each year brings new transitions as teams progress the supports, innovation and cultural change that is becoming deeply embedded within their communities. At this new milestone, they also took the time to reflect on learnings and insights, participating in an external mid-point evaluation that will be published later in 2026. External recognition of the strengths and impact of Our Town ways of working continues to grow, as the teams demonstrate what’s possible, collaborate across their communities and build evidence of supporting conditions for regional mental health and wellbeing.
Incorporating as its own entity in 2024, Spinifex Foundation SA focused on establishing its core operations in 2025 – bringing on new staff, launching its website, and distributing resources to community. The Foundation is the result of years of relationship-building, careful design, community informed and community-led decision-making.
This work has established a Foundation that is grounded in community, guided by culture, and committed to doing things differently. We are proud to have been part of the development journey over the past few years, and even more so for our ongoing partnership into the future.
In 2025, we welcomed new ways of working with Spinifex Foundation SA, including collaborative funding to support responsive opportunities for First Nations led organisations.
You can read more about Spinifex Foundation SA – including projects, funding opportunities, community engagement and advocacy – on its new website.
Partner feature: Just Listening Therapeutic Community
In the streets of Christies Beach, Just Listening Community (JLC) is paving the way in a new approach to mental health support.
For people who experience psychosis, hearing voices, or other states of emotional distress, JLC offers a psychotherapeutically informed and community-led alternative to accessing hospital emergency departments or other mental health services. It offers a unique space where people are welcomed into community, provided immediate support and connection, and offered justice in listening.
Led by the multidisciplinary team of the Humane Clinic – Matt Ball, Rory Ritchie and Berny Maywald – and supported by volunteers, everyone in the space is trained in and uses the Just Listening method.
Just Listening is a novel, non-medical therapeutic approach to listening and how we treat one another. Developed by the Humane Clinic, it seeks to offer justice to a person’s story and experience of living through listening with the intention of meaningful human to human connection. While developed as a response for people in distress, it holds deeper implications for human experiences of being in relationship with each other and restoring connection within communities.
"I just wanted to thank you for giving me the ability to think without fear, to speak without being misunderstood."
We have partnered with the JLC team for over five years. In 2025, we were excited for an opportunity to support work in expanding their reach as they offered free 12-month training in Just Listening for those who support people in psychosis, suicidal crisis or emotional distress.
As this training rolls out in South Australia, JLC’s international partnership with Healthcare Central London (part of the UK’s National Health Service) is expanding the approach even further – bringing Just Listening to 2,000 staff and over 200,000 people who access health and social care services in Westminster. The partnership recognises the two-way benefits of Just Listening, in better supporting clients experiencing mental ill-health at the same time as promoting mental wellbeing for health workers.
Building on previous findings of improved wellbeing for both community and volunteers, a newly published study confirmed these wellbeing outcomes for healthcare workers trained in the approach.
“JL training is the reset we need in healthcare. It teaches us to listen first, not to focus on what the system can or can’t do. It leads to a cultural shift in how we approach care” – study participant (community health and wellbeing worker)
This evidence is consistent with experiences shared across our networks and partners. The Just Listening approach is changing narratives and the way we understand experiences of psychosis, hearing voices, and states of emotional distress. We often hear stories about its influence spanning community-based organisations, in clinical spaces, and in people’s personal lives and day-to-day interactions.
While JLC’s training program in South Australia is smaller in scope, we know it will have a powerful impact bringing compassionate care to people experiencing distress and changing narratives about mental health and mental illness.
Progressing our Reconciliation Action Plan
The second year of our Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) saw us continue to learn and reflect on our practices as a Foundation, the relationships we hold with First Nations communities and relationships we are yet to develop.
Last year, we reflected that this work takes time and must be grounded in and led by those relationships. We also acknowledged that our responsibility to reconciliation is broader than the scope of actions listed in our RAP – but progressing our RAP has been important for examining our organisation at all levels, identifying learning needs, and staying intentional to growing cultural safety and responsiveness within our organisation.
These reflections continued to be true as we travelled the second year. Moving into 2026, we have engaged a First Nations consultant to support us through a deep reflection on our actions during the RAP and how we embed our learnings into our ongoing commitment to reconciliation. Following this reflection period, we look forward to sharing more about the journey of our two-year RAP.
Our Evaluation Approach and Impact
Our approach to evaluation strongly focuses on understanding how we are showing up as a partner, how our partners are going about their work, and our collective contributions to shared goals.
During the year, we collect data through internal impact logs, interviews with grant partners, informal check-ins, and stories shared with us. Our collective end-of-year sensemaking as a team unpacks the data we collect and looks to understand:
Where are we seeing evidence of impact, and how does this align with our Theory of Change?
What are we learning – about shifting landscape for our partners, about our own contribution to change, and how we can best support community-led work?
Our Theory of Change centres around our fundamental belief that communities are the experts in their own lives and our greatest impact is contributing to pathways for communities to lead preventive wellbeing solutions.
We believe that if we focus our actions on how we show up in partnership with communities then not only will we better support their work, but we can be part of shifting broader funding and systemic conditions.
Through measuring and sharing social impact aligned with our Theory of Change, we hope to tell a story about how funders can work in different ways and how elevating community leadership contributes to broader social transformation.
You can read more about our SIML framework development and review our Theory of Change here.
Where are we seeing change?
Some of the signs of change we hope to see are close to the work that we do. Others may show up further out, more deeply embedded within communities and systems. But each year we reflect that signs of impact become stronger in these outer ripples of change. While more distanced from our actions, these outer ripples are an important part of the long-term systems change we hope to contribute towards.
How we understand our contribution – and reasons why ripples show up when they do – varies. It may be the time it takes for meaningful change to happen, moving pieces or growing momentum in broader change movements, or evolution in our vantage point to see change.
In any event, the nature of our long-term partnerships is key. Multi-year and untied funding provide communities with space and time for the seeds they plant to grow. The strength of these longer-term relationships shapes shared understanding of change, contributes to weaving connections across movements, and sets opportunities for information to travel between us and our partners.
By virtue of these relationships, we saw ripples in 2025 across all pathways in our Theory of Change: shifting narratives about mental health and wellbeing, conditions for powered up communities leading change, and the funding flows and practice that can enable (or get in the way) of this work.
Shifting conditions for different ways of wellbeing
Sign of change: Community members having the choice to access a range of local, tailored responses
A significant change we’ve noticed over past years – and showing up again in 2025 – is expanded access to person-centred, strengths-based and community-led wellbeing solutions.
This change reflects broader patterns of recognition and investment in community-based approaches, as systems shift slowly in this direction. We also observe this to continue to be directly connected with our partnerships that invest resources for communities to explore, develop and work towards these solutions.
In 2025 we distributed $2.6 million to community-based partners, which was 75% of our total grants. Directing these resources into community hands, our intention is to fund into gaps for community-based prevention solutions that sit outside service-based clinical or treatment responses. We also recognise the many intersectional experiences of these funding gaps, including ways that communities may be disproportionately impacted by exacerbating factors – such as structural racism, discrimination and social marginalisation, intergenerational trauma, wealth inequality, and service gaps or inaccessibility.
There is strong community activation for change where these experiences are felt strongly. We see that activation reflected in our grant applications, and we are on a continuous journey to make our grant processes more accessible for diverse communities. In our 2025 grants, communities we funded into ranged across:
People working towards place-based responses for their local communities, primarily in regional communities but also neighbourhoods and suburbs in the Greater Adelaide area
First Nations-led responses, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities
Diverse multicultural communities
LGBTIQA+ communities
People connected by lived experience of mental distress, as well as other circumstances such as involvement with justice or child protection systems
Other communities with shared experience and identities including neurodivergence, older people, young people, and purpose-driven communities.
The impacts we see within communities align with well-established evidence from local, national and international sources. The story follows that when people have opportunities to connect in with wellbeing initiatives led by trusted members of their community, they engage. Approaches are suited to their circumstances and needs through design, and wellbeing improves beyond individuals through strengthening the social fabric of communities – such as connection, participation and collective networks of support.
Our partners hold the many stories that make these impacts real, and we encourage exploring their resources. To name just a few …
Each of the Our Town communities releases an annual impact share – read them on the Our Town website
Multicultural Communities Council of SA’s recently released a new report, telling the story of their two-year community-led Discovery project – Connection is Prevention: A Community-Led Model for Men’s Mental Health
Several of our partners launched websites in 2025 – including for Neighbourhood Node’s Minor Works program and the Spinifex Foundation SA
Many of our partners are powerful storytellers through their social media – check out accounts such as Imagine Uraidla and Just Listening Community.
Community-led decision making
Sign of change: Communities that are connected and supported to determine collective priorities for social transformation
Through demonstrating high-trust granting and power sharing, we aim to contribute to changes in funding flows that promote greater community control.
In 2025, we continued to see evidence of impact connecting our ways of working and partnership with resources flowing to community identified priorities. We also noticed a shift further along this change pathway, to communities connected and supported to determine collective priorities for social transformation.
This is particularly evident in our long-term partnerships in the Our Town initiative and with Spinifex Foundation SA. An important feature of each partnership is investing resources into community-based governance or decision-making structures that determine collective priorities and further direct resources where they are most needed – without funders who are external to those communities getting in the middle of decisions.
In 2025, statewide media highlighted the community-based impacts of Our Town and Spinifex Foundation SA, such as supporting truth telling, strengthening community knowledge and connection across generations, and growth in community empowerment and activism.
This media coverage demonstrates the threads between community-led mechanisms setting priorities for distributing resources, and unlocking deep social and cultural change.
Voices of our Elders captures Indigenous history from Limestone Coast
KI students campaign to tackle drink driving
Spinifex Foundation SA continued Story of Place grants in 2025, intended to provide an opportunity for communities to tell a story in their own way about their place, facilitating communities coming together to connect, share knowledge and culture, and build a new community-led narrative.
Tara Bonney, Meintangk and Nurrungga woman and (then) Burrandies Aboriginal Corporation Director of Language and Education spoke to the ABC about their Story of Place project – “The Voice of Our Elders” – highlighting how it brings generations closer together:
“One of the things that is so important to First Nations culture and community is the transmission of information. … When young blackfellas can see the photos and words of their elders and their family in a printed book, there’s a sense of pride in their culture and belonging in this community.”
Read the article here.
Spinifex Foundation SA continued Story of Place grants in 2025, intended to provide an opportunity for communities to tell a story in their own way about their place, facilitating communities coming together to connect, share knowledge and culture, and build a new community-led narrative.
Tara Bonney, Meintangk and Nurrungga woman and (then) Burrandies Aboriginal Corporation Director of Language and Education spoke to the ABC about their Story of Place project – “The Voice of Our Elders” – highlighting how it brings generations closer together:
“One of the things that is so important to First Nations culture and community is the transmission of information. … When young blackfellas can see the photos and words of their elders and their family in a printed book, there’s a sense of pride in their culture and belonging in this community.”
Read the article here.
The vision for Kangaroo Island Our Town (KIOT) is that every person living on the island is equipped with the tools to support themselves and others toward improved wellbeing and positive mental health wellbeing. The team hold a strong focus on young people as leaders, shaping social conditions not only for themselves and their peers but for their whole community.
Media coverage of a local young person-led campaign supported by KIOT highlighted “a systemic line of changes in how students are relating to activism”. As Alex Smith, Head of Parndana Campus told InDaily:
“[Young people] are now more aware that they have a voice, and they have power to do something about a problem that they perceive in their community, and they’re willing to give it a go”.
Read the article here.
Alongside these mechanisms within communities, we also see the strength in movements and learnings linking up across communities.
We’ve noticed an increasing trend in connections forming between partners from different communities – hearing about each others’ work through word of mouth, social media networks and sectoral relationships. When communities connect in this way, we see learnings travelling, networks forming for advocacy and influence, inspiration shared, and pockets of energy and community activation nurtured to grow.
While these relationships often form organically, we are intentional in seeking opportunities to weave our partners together. This might look like:
Supporting community-based organisations to attend connection events, gatherings and conferences
Continuing its journey as an Indigenous-led Fund (ILF) for South Australia, Spinifex Foundation SA co-convened its first sector gathering in 2025, “Walking Together”. The gathering brought together ILF representatives from across the country and internationally to form connections and grow momentum for the movement.
“‘Walking Together’ is a landmark step in resourcing and recognising the leadership of Indigenous-led Funds across Australia – strengthening the foundations for enduring collaboration, deepening practice of Indigenous philanthropy, and honouring the cultural power of coming together in the right way.”
– Warren Miller, CEO, Spinifex Foundation SA
Hosting our own connection events for partners
We hear from our partners that we hold an important role in weaving connections across the different focus areas, projects and communities they are embedded within. Supporting time to come together as peers provides valuable learning and sharing opportunities – to dive deeper into different ways for community-based approaches, identify shared goals and understand broader contexts and breadth of work.
“We are different organisations, with different communities, different priorities and different approaches but we are all the same in that we believe that we need to do things different for better outcomes for community.”
– collective words from our 2024 Discovery partners, AWFOSA, Mariposa Trails and Neighbourhood Node.
You can read about the get togethers we hosted in 2025 for our current Discovery and Spark Partners.
Supporting networks for learnings, advocacy and influence
In 2025, we saw the power of the collective Our Town SA network continue to grow, connecting leaders within each of the Our Town communities for strategic advocacy and influence for regional mental health and wellbeing.
An example of its influence in community-led systems change can be seen through engagement with the Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence. The Royal Commission’s final report puts a spotlight on Our Town as a case example of community-led prevention that “combines community mobilisation and social activism to prompt longer-term sustainable shifts in regional mental health.” The SA government has accepted the Royal Commission’s recommendation to further embed community-based prevention approaches through partnering with communities to design a community-based prevention model for family and domestic violence – informed by the Our Town model.
Read more about Our Town’s approach to community-led systems change.
Funders working with communities
Sign of change: Funders and community forming partnerships to implement community determined initiatives
Alongside amplifying impact stories for communities and systems change, our impact measurement and learning approach aims to capture another story – of how we and other funders can show up in different ways that better support communities in their work.
We aim to contribute to that story through holding a strong learning stance, internally and with communities. In partnerships, the how is just as important as the what. There are common features of our practice and relationships learnt over time and valued by our partners, which we aim to continually grow upon and adapt. Time in longer-term relationships challenges us to develop more nuanced understanding of context, moving beyond surface-level knowledge or becoming fixed in our ways of working.
To test and build on these learnings, we also aim to share openly about our work, what we hear from communities and how we are shifting or evolving our practice.
In 2025, this included sharing:
Our journey in evolving our strategy
Insights from applications received, and the decision-making process, in our 2025 open Spark grant round
A resource about our approach to mental health and wellbeing.
We were also grateful to learn alongside our strategic partner, MCCSA, and contribute to exploring enabling conditions in relationships between community-based organisations and funders. Their report Connection is Prevention: A Community-Led Model for Men’s Mental Health includes recommendations for funders directed at:
Recognising often unfunded components of community-led work – including the role of connectors and system navigation, and access to stable, culturally safe spaces to meet regularly
Shifting the norms of funding practice – to prioritise long-term trust-based funding, and evaluation and sharing approaches that are relational, narrative and co-owned.
We reflect on some of these topics more in our section: Key Learnings for 2025.
Alongside contributing to publicly available information, we value engaging relationally with other funders about practice learnings that enable community-led work. In 2025, we saw this engagement contribute to framework development, shifts in strategic direction, and resourcing skills development for staff in working alongside communities.
As evidence demonstrates more and more what’s possible from authentic partnership between communities and funders, we are seeing this engagement deepen. In 2025, we noticed further progress beyond funders adopting elements of funding practice to a broadened sphere of private and public funders with genuine interest in partnerships aimed at implementing community-determined initiatives.
2025 saw the evolution of a significant funding partnership between two Our Town communities – Mid Murray Our Town and Our Town Berri – alongside ourselves, the Paul Ramsay Foundation and the Department of Human Services SA. The partnership recognises and builds on the work of the Mid Murray Our Town and Our Town Berri teams over the past five years and provides foundational funding for the following five years.
The partnership agreement was developed collaboratively and actively shaped from all sides. Key features of the partnership and ways of working were led by learnings from Mid Murray Our Town and Our Town Berri, built upon through their Our Town experience in past years and the deep connections held within their communities.
"By working differently in the Our Town way — always keeping community priorities at the heart of what we do — we are seeing profound improvements in wellbeing and empowering individuals to respond to local needs in meaningful ways."
"We are now resourced longer term to work as social innovators in our community. Building the capabilities of our people to lead the changes we want to see to improve positive wellbeing, is key to our work."
The flow-on impacts from this process are already surfacing, with the story of how the agreement formed and important features for promoting community-led work travelling within funding networks. We hope this sharing can continue to influence other funder-community relationships outside the Our Town initiative.
Key Learnings
2025 was a significant year of reflection and learning for our team, as we underwent an evolution of our strategy. We spent time sitting with our partners and networks to better understand where we’re on the right track, and where we could deepen, stretch or evolve our work.
Alongside learnings from past years and our continued work through 2025, our reflections and insights crystallised into a future strategic direction – that we look forward to releasing soon.
Read more about insights into our strategy journey.
#1 Time interacts with communities and our partnerships in complex ways
There is no rule book for how time interacts with community work, and our partners are often navigating the grey space between urgency of change; existing and future opportunities; community energy and readiness; and the patience needed for long-term systemic and cultural change.
These grey spaces show up in our own work, calling on us to stay flexible and responsive to community need and emerging opportunities and steward resources with responsibility to future generations.
In truth, there is no tension between what is needed now and what will support future generations. Communities hold the wisdom to navigate these grey spaces and work through paths forward. Our responsibility is to keep getting better at listening and responding to this wisdom.
How this informs our strategy moving forward…
Our core purpose is backing communities to lead strengths-based narratives and ways for community wellbeing. As we continue this work through new and current partnerships, we are evolving how time, pace and responsiveness show up in our granting structures – backing longer-term partnerships, exploring new pathways for short-term responsive funding and adapting how our grants support different stages of community-led work.
We will also work with communities to deepen our understanding of the landscape for social change, and what’s needed from us both now and in the future.
#2 We can be more intentional in supporting enabling conditions for community-led wellbeing
Over the years, we’ve heard from partners that our grants are a valuable opportunity to sit in a space of learning with community, to further grow shared understanding of what makes wellbeing possible, and develop and test approaches that work for different communities.
At the same time, we recognise that these opportunities are far too rare. Our ability to fund into these gaps is not enough to shift broader conditions that act as barriers to community-based solutions.
During engagement for our evolving strategy – and consistent with learnings from our partnerships over the years – we heard the call for a more significant focus in walking alongside communities to strategically renegotiate how resources flow. Our discussions focused on three key enabling conditions for sustainable, long-term change:
Sustainable pathways for community leadership and agency
Access to low-cost, culturally safe and accessible spaces for communities to gather, plan and engage in wellbeing activities
Access to regenerative wealth sources for communities to draw on for emerging needs, and to support planning and implementation for long-term approaches.
How this learning informs our strategy moving forward…
We are working to embed learnings about the “runways” that communities need to promote wellbeing – such as local leadership, trusted frameworks, secure spaces and secure capital – into our partnership structures.
This work is complex, and we are investing resources into exploring what meaningful support towards growing these enabling conditions looks like. Practically, our initial focus is turning to opening new relationships and working with existing partners who hold expertise related to community-based infrastructure and wealth building.
#3 Roles are emerging for the Foundation in spreading the reach of change
At the end of each year, our team sits together to discuss learnings and how collective impact with our partners is showing up. Recently, when we mapped these discussions against our Theory of Change, we noticed something interesting – more and more, we didn’t have a neat place for our data. After six years of developing our partnership approaches and working in community-based preventive mental health and wellbeing, it became clear that we’ve moved beyond our initial understanding of how change might play out.
In particular, we noticed impacts related to our role in influencing funding and broader systems that we didn’t anticipate. For example, in brokering spaces between funders and communities, and where our voice held weight and ability to support shifting the conversation to prioritise community expertise.
These insights were consistent with a theme arising in our strategy engagement – we were reminded that we hold unique opportunities and networks, and we heard a clear call for the Foundation to be more intentional in our role as a connector, advocate, and partner walking alongside communities.
How this learning informs our strategy moving forward…
In our evolving strategy, we aim to deepen and stretch our work in response to these insights – with a pillar centred around spreading the reach and influence of community-led change.
We recognise we have a role in amplifying stories and negotiating with systems through brokering spaces and using evidence to advocate for changed funding conditions and relationships.
This work will involve leveraging the networks, influence and evidence we hold, alongside resourcing community leadership in storytelling and collective advocacy spaces.