The intention behind our Spark Grant funding is to be able to support organisations and individuals to collaborate and partner with community. It enables them to sit in the possibility of what might make a difference to their understanding or experience of preventative approaches to mental health and the conditions for wellbeing. Unlike many other funding opportunities, Spark aims to enable deep listening, understanding, exploring, and testing to develop and learn together, rather than funding to deliver services or predetermined outputs.

A data informed reflection on our first Spark Round in 2021 provided insights on how what occurred during the Spark Grant period reflected the initial intent and design of the program. This was informed by feedback from applicants, interviews with our 2021 partners, and observations and process learnings captured along the way. These insights helped us to understand what needed to shift, adapt, or be made more clear, as well as what worked well and where there was value we hadn’t predicted. 

The following is a summary of those learnings:

• Our first Spark round was also a learning experience for us and we tried not to put too many restricting factors in place. What we learnt was that we needed to provide more guidance and support for people to feel comfortable being in the grey. 

• Initially Spark offered more formalised capability building and peer learning opportunities in addition to the grant funding itself. We learnt that encouraging an open and iterative way of working and a learning mindset was actually more of an enabling condition than structured resources.

• Spark is all about exploring what you don’t know, or might not have had the opportunity to learn, alongside community. We learnt that not needing to have the answer or a predetermined outcome or output felt freeing and enabled our partners to work in a way which was naturally guided by community.

• The way of working encouraged in Spark, type of funding opportunity, and application style is different from traditional grants. We learnt from the application phase that we needed to provide more clarity about how to apply and what a Spark Grant might look like.

• The original Spark timeline was designed to be nine months in order to leave ample time to use Spark findings to apply for a Discovery Grant, though partners were always encouraged to take additional time as needed. We learnt that even getting ready to start takes time. For this Spark round we extended the timeline to 12 months to enable additional time at the start, while still enabling lead in time to Discovery Grants.  

Trends and themes

Within the applications there were a few trends and themes that stood out:

• Redesigning pathways, tools, and how people experience reaching out for support through the lens of people’s contextual perspective and experience.

• Exploring what prevention looks like relative to context, with recognition that for many this is not well understood or doesn’t have an existing body of evidence.

• Addressing the intersectional nature of physical and mental health.

Organisational sector

The broad social determinants and intersectionality of mental health and wellbeing was reflected in the breadth of organisational types that applied for Spark. The below indicates the sectors from which applications were received, however, it doesn't wholly demonstrate the wide range of focus areas and intersections including disability, ageing, and food relief, among many more. 

Community groups

We asked those applying to share who their community group was in their own words, below is our synthesis of this data, though we recognise people and communities are more than one thing and for each submission there were usually many ways in which they defined their community.

Types of approaches

We encouraged those applying to share what type of approach they would be applying to their work in Spark. Again, the below is a synthesis of the data provided, the intention being to understand the mechanisms people intend to use to explore preventative mental health and the conditions for wellbeing with their community.

Our six new Spark partners are representative of, or work closely with, a broad range of community groups including First Nations, culturally diverse communities, young people, LGBTQIA+ and ageing communities, parents, and geographically defined regional communities. To read more about our new Spark partners and the opportunities they’ll be exploring head here.

We reflect on each grant process that we run, and consider how people engaged and responded to the opportunity and information provided to continue refining and iterating our internal processes and the information we provide.

A key learning from this round is to provide more direct guidance and examples to show the correlation between working openly and the degree to which the outcome of a proposal is predetermined or focussed.

We also received lots of positive feedback about the Information Session we ran, and the opportunity to connect with us directly to discuss ideas for an application and to learn more about the Foundation. We are committed to continuing to improve our accessibility and ways to engage with us, for transparent and supportive conversations about alignment and approaches to applying.