It’s important to start by acknowledging the Foundation as it was when I started: principled, progressive, and with an appetite to embrace risk. It had already done the work and built the evidence to inform the Foundation’s focus on mental health and wellbeing. It was a great platform to build from and I’ll be forever thankful to Stacey Thomas (the inaugural CEO) for those early hard yards. 

Fay Fuller Foundation and the world looked a little different when I started. Within months of my commencement, South Australia was hit by bushfires, and COVID arrived on our shores - both bringing about uncertainty and fear for communities. For the Foundation, along with having a new CEO, we were also planning to double our annual distributions and launch our largest ever grant commitment through Our Town. Despite all of this, we did our best to be responsive, moving our work with Our Town online and responding to stressors in the third sector by providing certainty and clarity to partners and communities we already held trusting relationships with. For me, it was an early indicator of how well placed philanthropy was to meet need quickly and show up in ways other funders couldn’t.   

Upon reflection - nothing reveals the cracks in systems and how ill-equipped they are to serve those they’re designed to support like the unprecedented. This exposing of the cracks provided us with the impetus to reevaluate our purpose, sitting in vital questions around what we were hearing from community and considering how we could respond. 

In the world of building organisations, I've always been a believer in ‘form matching function’. That is, you should have clarity of what you want to do and how you want to do it before you think about the resources required to execute. With this firmly in mind, before we looked to expand our team and forge new partnerships, we embarked on a process of clarifying our goals and defining our ways of working. We considered the reason for our very existence and got clear on for whose benefit the Foundation should operate. We questioned the nature of the resources we were in control of and how they had been accumulated, reflecting on our Founder and her intention for the Foundation. Finally, we got comfortable in our remit to adapt the Foundation to better reflect the changing world around us.

In answering the above questions, the one word most commonly used was ‘community’. It became clear we saw ourselves as custodians of community money rather than family wealth and this clarity informed a need for us to build our legitimacy to partner with community. We posed curious questions about what true partnership with communities entailed and sought to understand how we could show up as a partner in First Nations spaces in ways that weren’t defined by the norms of traditional philanthropy, but in ways that shifted power and decision making, and centred self-determination. With our purpose clarified and our north star set, our focus areas and roles began to crystallise. 

We sat and listened to the needs and aspirations of community in all its forms and we were asked to do the following: 

• fund differently, because it was needed and because we could

• embrace action not empty rhetoric

• divest power and not view the community-led sector as risky when they didn’t have the balance sheet of a large not for profit

• be principled in action, trusting in nature, and preference the needs of community over ourselves when designing processes

• challenge entrenched systems, particularly in the realm of healthcare, where individuals were often viewed as problems to be solved

• listen and learn from people’s experiences and hold that communities are the solution-creators and not the problem-makers

We understood clearly that we had a role in strengthening and building the conditions for communities to be well - underpinned by a belief that community, in all of its complexity and diversity, knew what those conditions were. We began to hold an inalienable truth - one we continue to hold today - that communities are experts in their own lives.

In response, we needed to shift resources into the hands of communities to enact their expertise - to enact self determination. We embraced the fact that the Foundation’s privilege and wealth could be used to hold space for ideas and conversations not often heard and for systems-focused but community-activated ideas to emerge. 

What you see of the Foundation as it stands today is an imperfect and evolving attempt to respond to the above; a Foundation aware of the work we still need to do and the flaws of the sector we belong to but with clarity on our role as a change-maker with community at the heart.