Annual Report
2022

Contents

The Founder
Welcome and overview
Granting strategy
Case Studies
The Founder
Welcome and Overview
Granting Strategy
Partnering for greater impact
Long-term partnerships
Supporting capacity building
Scaling up proven models
Resilience in regional Victoria
Addressing the challenge of mental health
Supporting local communities
Concise Financial Report 2021-22
Grants Paid
Team
Concise Financial Report 2021-22
Grants paid
The William Buckland Foundation team
The Trustees and William Buckland Foundation team acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands we live and work on across Victoria. William Buckland was born on the lands of the Taungurung People, the Traditional Custodians of Mansfield. We pay respect to Elders past and present.

The William Buckland Foundation aims to improve the lives of disadvantaged Victorians through grants that support better housing, health, education and employment outcomes. We also fund initiatives that build resilience in rural and regional communities.

Total grants paid
$6,798,213
Since its establishment in 1965, the Foundation has
distributed in excess of $135m for Victorians.

“to benefit a
wonderful country
and a wonderful
people, Australia and
Australians.”

The Founder

The Foundation which bears his name commemorates William Buckland, a highly successful businessman and pastoralist in the middle years of the 20th century.

On his death in 1964, William Buckland left the bulk of his large estate, £925,000, to establish a Foundation. The income was to be used “to benefit a wonderful country and a wonderful people. Australia and Australians”. A copy of his biography, William Lionel Buckland by David T. Merrett is available from Equity Trustees or public libraries.

Welcome and overview

Dr Jane Gilmour, Chair

Ferdi Hepworth, William Buckland
Foundation Lead, Equity Trustees

As a testamentary trust, we are not able to draw on the Foundation’s capital. We therefore depend on our three fund managers to generate income from which we distribute grants. We have been pleased with the performance of the managers who have generated income, excluding capital components, of $6.758m, of which we distributed grants totalling $6.066m.

Developing our Impact Investing policy and framework has been a focus for this year. We have worked closely with EQT, as they see the William Buckland Foundation could represent a model for other trusts and foundations in their portfolio.

The first meetings of the newly established Audit and Risk Committee were held this year. A risk matrix was agreed and this will be reviewed annually. Succession planning has also been on our agenda this year as we look to future changes in trustees.

On a personal note, we were sad to hear of the death of William Meader Buckland during the year. He was the son of William Buckland and we express our condolences to the remaining members of William Buckland’s family.

Once again, I express my appreciation to my fellow trustees—Ross Barker, Jenny McGregor, David Williamson and the EQT Trustee representative, Jodi Kennedy—for their ongoing contribution and commitment to the work of the Foundation. I take this opportunity to congratulate Jodi Kennedy, whose appointment as a Director of ETWSL was announced in August 2022. Ferdi Hepworth in her role of Foundation Lead has continued to bring to our attention charitable organisations that are doing outstanding and innovative work to address disadvantage in our communities.

She has been ably supported by Granting and Impact Manager, Elyse Cook. National Manager, Charitable Trusts Amanda Sartor has provided critical support. It has been a pleasure and an honour to work as part of this team of talented people.

Welcome and overview

As a testamentary trust, we are not able to draw on the Foundation’s capital. We therefore depend on our three fund managers to generate income from which we distribute grants. We have been pleased with the performance of the managers who have generated income, excluding capital components, of $6.758m, of which we distributed grants totalling $6.066m.

Developing our Impact Investing policy and framework has been a focus for this year. We have worked closely with EQT, as they see the William Buckland Foundation could represent a model for other trusts and foundations in their portfolio.

The first meetings of the newly established Audit and Risk Committee were held this year. A risk matrix was agreed and this will be reviewed annually. Succession planning has also been on our agenda this year as we look to future changes in trustees.

On a personal note, we were sad to hear of the death of William Meader Buckland during the year. He was the son of William Buckland and we express our condolences to the remaining members of William Buckland’s family.

Once again, I express my appreciation to my fellow trustees—Ross Barker, Jenny McGregor, David Williamson and the EQT Trustee representative, Jodi Kennedy—for their ongoing contribution and commitment to the work of the Foundation. I take this opportunity to congratulate Jodi Kennedy, whose appointment as a Director of ETWSL was announced in August 2022. Ferdi Hepworth in her role of Foundation Lead has continued to bring to our attention charitable organisations that are doing outstanding and innovative work to address disadvantage in our communities.

She has been ably supported by Granting and Impact Manager, Elyse Cook. National Manager, Charitable Trusts Amanda Sartor has provided critical support. It has been a pleasure and an honour to work as part of this team of talented people.

As I look back on the financial year that ended in June 2022, I reflect that Victorians spent a very significant portion of that year in lockdown. It was not until late April 2022 that all restrictions were lifted. Slowly we have seen people resume the rhythm and activities of their pre-Covid lives, even though Covid is still present in our communities. Meetings are at last being held face-to-face, sporting events have resumed, as have theatrical and musical performances. Nonetheless the impacts of these long periods of isolation continue to be felt. Students have been particularly affected with many experiencing mental and social distress; people living in care have been deprived of the presence of loved ones; organisations and businesses have experienced significant disruption and people’s livelihoods have been threatened.

Our response has been, as it was in 2021, to focus our giving towards our existing grant partners in order to ensure the delivery of the services they provide.

Jane Gilmour
Chair

This year has been a time of planning and strengthening our approach and we are pleased to have completed our five-year granting strategy review. During the review process we engaged with experts in the field and thank those who provided their guidance and insight along the way. The revised strategy draws on solid foundations, continuing with the four main grant making areas: Agriculture, Education, Pathways to Employment and Housing and Health.

The key changes incorporated in the new strategy include a stronger emphasis on partnerships that embeds our support for collaborative funding approaches. It is encouraging to see groups of donors coming together to learn and listen to the voice of lived experience before grant making in a collaborative way. In particular the Family Violence and Out of Home Care funder groups come to mind.

Another focus has been to strengthen our commitment to funding both programmatic and capacity building funding supporting organisations to maximise their ability to deliver high quality services.

We all know that what gets measured gets managed and so we have set our intentions to measure our support for Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people, people seeking asylum, people with disability and women and girls. We look forward to reporting on this in future annual reports.

With our new granting strategy agreed, we have resumed open grant rounds. These are supported by an updated website, streamlined guidelines and process. We will continue to look for ways to create a more inclusive process as well as breaking down invisible barriers to engaging with the Foundation.

I can’t thank the Trustees and the William Buckland Foundation team enough for a great year and I look forward to getting back to what we do so well, making thoughtful grants that improve outcomes for Victorians.

Ferdi Hepworth, William Buckland
Foundation Lead, Equity Trustees

Welcome and overview

Dr Jane Gilmour, Chair

Ferdi Hepworth, William Buckland
Foundation Lead, Equity Trustees

As a testamentary trust, we are not able to draw on the Foundation’s capital. We therefore depend on our three fund managers to generate income from which we distribute grants. We have been pleased with the performance of the managers who have generated income, excluding capital components, of $6.758m, of which we distributed grants totalling $6.066m.

Developing our Impact Investing policy and framework has been a focus for this year. We have worked closely with EQT, as they see the William Buckland Foundation could represent a model for other trusts and foundations in their portfolio.

The first meetings of the newly established Audit and Risk Committee were held this year. A risk matrix was agreed and this will be reviewed annually. Succession planning has also been on our agenda this year as we look to future changes in trustees.

On a personal note, we were sad to hear of the death of William Meader Buckland during the year. He was the son of William Buckland and we express our condolences to the remaining members of William Buckland’s family.

Once again, I express my appreciation to my fellow trustees—Ross Barker, Jenny McGregor, David Williamson and the EQT Trustee representative, Jodi Kennedy—for their ongoing contribution and commitment to the work of the Foundation. I take this opportunity to congratulate Jodi Kennedy, whose appointment as a Director of ETWSL was announced in August 2022. Ferdi Hepworth in her role of Foundation Lead has continued to bring to our attention charitable organisations that are doing outstanding and innovative work to address disadvantage in our communities.

She has been ably supported by Granting and Impact Manager, Elyse Cook. National Manager, Charitable Trusts Amanda Sartor has provided critical support. It has been a pleasure and an honour to work as part of this team of talented people.

Granting strategy

The wishes of William Buckland, as expressed in his Will, underpin our strategy as we continue to adapt our funding practices, thinking and approach. The Foundation targets our funding across four areas:

  • Strengthening resilience in agricultural communities,
  • Improving educational outcomes for disadvantaged children,
  • Supporting disadvantaged Victorians into appropriate employment and safe and secure housing,
  • Improving health outcomes for young people, particularly in rural and regional communities.

Read More

We work to deepen our understanding, engage with our grantees and collaborate with other philanthropic funders to overcome the causes of social and economic disadvantage. We continue to focus our grant making on innovative solutions to complex problems and to amplify the reach of these projects where appropriate.

Our support is balanced between meeting the immediate and basic needs of the most disadvantaged in the community, and more transformative long-term investments.

The WilliamBuckland Foundation
is focused on improving the lives of disadvantaged Victorians through grants that support better housing, health, education and employment outcomes and initiatives that build resilience and strengthen rural and regional communities.

Advancing
Agriculture

Focus: Strengthening
resilience
in agricultural
communities

Improved
Health

Focus: Improving
health outcomes
for young people,
particularly in rural
and regional communities

Enabling
Education

Focus: Improving
educational outcomes
for disadvantaged
children

Pathways to
Employment
& Housing

Focus: Supporting
disadvantaged Victorians
into appropriate
employment and safe
and secure housing

Major grant partnerships
Undertaken by the Foundation in collaboration with other funders and experts $150+ per annum | 3 to ten years | By invitation only

Open program grant rounds
Advancing Agriculture, Enabling Education, Improving Health and Pathways to Employment and Housing $50-150K per annum | One to four years | Open grant rounds annually

Capacity building grants
Funding that supports organisations to deliver better outcomes for the children, families and communities they serve $100-$150 per annum | One to two years | By invitation only (existing grant partners)

Partnership grants
Targeted funding to collaborative initiatives with a particular focus on regional Victoria Up to 150K per annum | Up to three years | Through invited partners

Trustees’ discretion
Emergency grants to provide immediate relief and grants that strengthen sector capacity $30-50K average | One year | By invitation only

Strengthening families
and protecting children

Partnering
for greater
impact

Partnering
for greater
impact

Helping Australia meet its present
and future water and catchment
management challenges...

Victorian Aboriginal
Child Care Agency

Bringing up Aboriginal Babies at Home

The Foundation has been part of the Out of Home Care philanthropic funder group since its inception in 2017 and continues to back the model of collaborative funding which enhances learning, multiplies funding and seeks to learn from the experts in the sector and participants themselves.

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The most recent project funded by the collaboration is the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency – Bringing up Aboriginal Babies at Home (BuBAH) project. Just like parents everywhere, Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander families want what’s best for their kids and this project provides support for young Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander parents to keep their children safe, meet their developmental goals and prevent entries into Out of Home Care.

VACCA, in partnership with the Department of Social Work at the University of Melbourne, is delivering a new approach to supporting young Aboriginal women who are pregnant or have an infant, through a structured co-design process that brings together Aboriginal parents, support groups and child protection experts to identify what is needed in Frankston and Bayside to support young mums and families.

Practically, this looks like the employment of a Koorie pregnancy and baby practitioner based in Frankston for 18 months and the development and delivery of localised cultural awareness training for hospital-based doctors and midwives in public maternity care services and for child protection practitioners in Bayside.

“VACCA’s Bringing Up Aboriginal Babies at Home project is life changing. Through consultation with Elders, Aboriginal mums and key stakeholders across our region we have identified core issues leading to unnecessary unborn reports and the removal of Aboriginal babies from families. The program has shown that supporting vulnerable mothers early in their pregnancy makes a difference in strengthening families and protecting children.

The multi-year grant provided by a group of funders enabled a holistic, tangible & collaborative approach. Showing Aboriginal-led solutions and investing in Aboriginal self-determination can create long term multi-generational change.”

Muriel Bamblett, CEO, Victorian Aboriginal Childcare Agency

Long-term
partnerships

Enabling social connection
through employment,
training, education and
volunteering

Ensuring Indigenous
Victorian’s are able to access
outstanding education
opportunities.

Long-term
partnerships

Ensuring Indigenous
Victorian’s are able to access
outstanding education
opportunities.

Sacred Heart Mission

While the slide into homelessness can be alarmingly quick, supporting people to exit homelessness can take a lot longer, and it involves so much more than simply providing a home. Over 14 years of building evidence Sacred Heart Mission has proven what does work, providing wraparound support for three years to assist people to address their physical and mental health issues and build social connection through employment, training, education and volunteering.

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Starting from 2009 the Journey to Social Inclusion (J2SI) program sought to demonstrate that with the right support, people can transition out of homelessness, even those experiencing significant barriers. This very successful program has seen excellent results proven by randomised control trials and has also proved to be a cost-effective method for Government.

Is it working? Very successfully with outperform outcome payments being paid by government as outcomes have been achieved. The approach has also seen further government support with the Victorian Government funding an additional 120 people to be supported by J2SI in 2021.

The William Buckland Foundation has been a long-term supporter of the J2SI approach, firstly funding through grants and more recently through an innovative grant guarantee as part of the Social Impact Investment which would have provided some downside protection to Sacred Heart Mission in the possibility of them not achieving the outcomes that they had hoped for, and therefore not receiving outcomes-based Social Impact Investment payments.

As I come to the end of my 11 years as CEO of Sacred Heart Mission, the J2SI program is one of my proudest achievements. From the pilot in 2009 with 40 clients and philanthropic funding, J2SI has now supported 400 people experiencing chronic homelessness to move into stable housing and turn around their lives. Through wrapping services around the client and coordinating the service system, J2SI works in close partnership with other services to ensure clients are connected to specialist providers to meet their health, housing and other needs.

Cathy Humphrey, CEO, Sacred Heart Mission

Building
organisational
capacity

Providing new beginnings
for women and children at
risk of homelessness

Supporting young people from refugee
backgrounds to pursue
their dreams.

Supporting
capacity
building

Supporting young people from refugee
backgrounds to pursue
their dreams.

Women’s Property Initiative

Women’s Property Initiative (WPI) creates new beginnings for women and children at risk of homelessness by providing permanent and affordable homes, access to support networks and ongoing advocacy.

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The Foundation first supported organisational capacity-building for WPI in 2019 & 2020 as we recognised the importance of their work in addressing the homelessness and housing crisis experienced by single women and their children. The Foundation has recently committed to a second two-year funding agreement.

The core support funding provided has enabled WPI to explore new partnerships, initiatives and models to advance projects to increase the supply of long-term, affordable housing for at-risk women. The importance of core funding to build organisational capacity cannot be underestimated when so much of the funding available is tied to specific projects and programs. Core funding helps WPI’s organisational capacity to work towards sustainability, a challenge in a model where tenants pay income-based rents.

As WPI increases housing stock and therefore the rental income that comes in as revenue to the organisation, the funding for this project will ultimately be covered by this revenue stream, but in the medium-term philanthropic funding is helping WPI to deliver the ambitious goal of owning 170 properties.

Women’s Property Initiatives would not be able to provide homes that accommodate more than 260 women and children without funding for our core operations… Funding to help us maintain our housing program and build the capacity to pursue our growth strategy is critical as we strive to become self-sustainable. The funding enabled us to employ an operations manager at a critical time for our organisation. Having this resource to manage our day-today operations and obligations enabled us to pursue several projects that have significantly expanded our supply of housing for vulnerable women.

Jeanette Large, CEO, Women’s Property Initiatives

Scaling up
proven
models

Empowering boys to
lead flourishing lives for
themselves, their relationships
and their communities

Supporting students at risk of
disengagement to grow key social
and emotional skills.

Scaling up
proven
models

Supporting students at risk of
disengagement to grow key social
and emotional skills.

The Man Cave

The Man Cave is a preventative mental health and emotional intelligence charity that empowers boys to become great men. Using evidence-based workshops and expert facilitation, the programs provide boys with the critical emotional and social skills they need to lead flourishing lives for themselves, their relationships and their communities.

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The Foundation funded the regional expansion project in 2018 to support the Man Cave to expand their model outside metro Melbourne. When Covid-19 hit in 2020 the organisation was forced to think differently about how to reach its audience of school-aged boys, when lockdowns meant that most were not attending school. The Foundation backed The Man Cave to adapt their delivery and extended their funding for a further year giving five years of support in total.

The answer to how to access boys and young men outside of school was to go digital, but the Man Cave went digital with a boom, enter The Cave on Twitch.

The Cave on Twitch is Man Cave’s official digital aftercare program designed to engage teenage boys in a healthy online environment. Twitch is a gaming and live video streaming platform that holds immense potential for engaging young men. The platform sees an average of 2.84 million viewers, 41% of whom are men under the age of 24.

The Man Cave streams live shows that promote healthier masculinities and are underpinned by a digitally adapted version of their social and emotional learning curriculum. By combining established intervention approaches with the use of video games, healthy role models, and entertainment-driven live educational content, over the past year, The Cave on Twitch has actively engaged over 48,000+ young people online.

We have converted over 1000 teenage boys from our face-to-face workshops to our online Twitch community, witnessed 2000+ mental health check-ins, and over 1200 shout-outs and peer support comments. It’s clear we’ve established a tight-knit and impactful online Man Cave community that is having a significant impact on the young people that have joined us.

Hunter Johnson, CEO, The Man Cave

Resilience
in regional
Victoria

Builds farmers’ skills to manage
agricultural production, longterm
sustainability and to be
more profitable

Taking students’ ideas
and aspirations beyond
the classroom.

Resilience
in regional
Victoria

Taking students’ ideas
and aspirations beyond
the classroom.

Sustainable Farms

The Sustainable Farms project builds farmers’ skills to manage agricultural production, longterm sustainability and to be more profitable along the way. Farm dams, creeks, remnant vegetation, native grasses and rocky outcrops are well-known features of farming landscapes. They are also valuable natural assets.

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Healthy natural assets support biodiversity and landscape function, which in turn underpin agricultural production.

From small, quick projects such as fencing a rocky outcrop, to longer-term investments such as planting a native shelterbelt, natural asset enhancements have something to offer for all farms and farming systems.

Sustainable Farms is a large project that spans the South West slopes of NSW and Northern Victoria and is funded by a range of organisations including philanthropy, the Federal Government, industry and natural resource management agencies. The project implements two decades of Australian National University (ANU) research, one of the largest, long-term studies of its kind in the world.

The Foundation has been supporting the work in Victoria since 2019, funding a state-based field officer role who continues the Sustainable Farms presence in central and north-eastern Victoria.

Practically the Sustainable Farms project works because it provides farmers with the support they need to make their farms more efficient, and ANU’s long-term ecology research on farms, supplemented by investigations into economics and mental health, shows that protecting and restoring natural assets on farms has multiple benefits. Explore the farmers stories on the Sustainable Farms website to bring it to life.

ANU Sustainable Farms has 650 long-term sites on 230 farms from central Victoria to Northern NSW covering 8.3m ha. The project focuses on biodiversity, ecosystem condition, key interventions like replanting, grazing control and natural asset enhancement. Results of our research are providing farmers with the practical tools and support to create thriving regional farming communities.

Michelle Young, Project Director, Sustainable Farms, Australian National University

Addressing the
challenge of
mental health

Reducing the impact
of mental ill-health on
young people

Reducing the impact
of mental ill-health on
young people.

Addressing the
challenge of
mental health

Reducing the impact
of mental ill-health on
young people.

Australians for Mental Health

The system is failing young Australians who need mental health support. Suicide is the leading cause of death among young Australians, accounting for one-third of deaths in people aged under 25—more than road accidents—and many more live with suicidal feelings. The impact of mental ill health ripples well beyond the individuals themselves and includes their families, friends and broader networks.

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Currently 1.2 million Australians fall into the #MissingMiddle. They are too unwell for primary care, but not unwell enough for state services, and currently fall through the cracks of a broken system. At the same time 54% of Australians with diagnosable mental health conditions do not receive adequate support. #FixTheWaitlist – unlike most other healthcare, there is no formal waitlist for people seeking mental healthcare.

Australians for Mental Health (AFMH) is an organisation founded by Pat McGorry AO (Australian of the Year, psychiatrist and life-long mental health reformer) focussed on mental health reform. AFMH is building grassroots support for mental health reforms that mean all Australians get better care, when they need it.

The Foundation supports Australians for Mental Health as we support the calls for a system that better supports young people to address their mental ill-health before it reaches crisis point. In 2022, AFMH launched a digital platform building grassroots support for improved waitlist management and increasing their Victorian supporter base by over 1,800 (12,250 across the country). AFMH have gained momentum with a pilot advocacy program in Victoria, recruiting 16 advocates to push for the full implementation of the recommendations from the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System, including addressing critical workforce shortages in mental healthcare.

Through the William Buckland Foundation’s investment, we continue our crucial advocacy work in mental healthcare systems reform, supporting the #missingmiddle and #fixthewaitlist.

Chris Raine, CEO, Australians for Mental Health

Supporting
local
communities

“home by the sea” is a
place of hope, healing
and belonging

Helping refugees and
migrants gain skills and
feel a sense of belonging.

Supporting
local
communities

Helping refugees and
migrants gain skills and
feel a sense of belonging.

Willum Warrain Aboriginal Association

Willum Warrain Aboriginal Association in Hastings operates a gathering place for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples living on the Mornington Peninsula. Willum Warrain means “home by the sea” in the local Bunurong language and is a place of hope, healing and belonging.

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An Independent Aboriginal Community- Controlled Organisation with a strategic focus on cultural strengthening, Willum Warrain runs a full calendar of events that engage Aboriginal children, families, and youth. As a locally embedded charity, they help members in distress via a community support fund.

The Foundation supported the Young Blood project for three years in 2019, but Covid-19 and lockdowns delayed the second Aboriginal Youth Summit, which came back bigger and better than ever in March 2022.

The Young Blood project gets in early to enhance connections between young Aboriginal people to place and culture, and create stronger education and employment pathways. Activities happen throughout the year but the Aboriginal Youth Summit is the pinnacle allowing young people from across the region to connect and strengthen their culture.

The day began with a Welcome to Country from Uncle Mick Edwards from the Bunurong Land Council followed by performances from Natarsha Bamblett and Mitch Tambo. In the afternoon, all the students contributed to an art installation combining weavings and burnt and ochred sticks.

Willum Warrain Aboriginal Gathering Place is a place of hope and healing for Aboriginal people living on the Mornington Peninsula. It is run by a 100% community-elected Aboriginal Board intent on a path of self-determination. It offers cultural programs and events throughout the year as well as providing charitable support for community members experiencing distress in their lives. It is also the largest local employer of Aboriginal people.

Peter Aldenhoven, Chief Executive Officer, Willum Warrain

The William
Buckland
Foundation

$0Improved Health
$0Advancing Agriculture
$0Trustees' Discretion
$0Partnership Program
$0Employment & Housing
Total
$0
$0Enabling education
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