William Lionel Buckland was a highly successful pastoralist who we know he had a great love of the land and agriculture – his suggestion that Trustees “give preference to agriculture and related pursuits” has been instrumental in developing our Agriculture Program.
Much has changed for the sector in Victoria and for farming communities since William Buckland’s death in 1964. Successful farming has required our farmers to innovate, while Australian farming communities have developed special kind of toughness and capacity to absorb change, seize opportunities to improve living standards, and to transform livelihood systems while sustaining the natural resource base.
Supporting farming expertise, entrepreneurship and leadership
Supporting the trialling and adoption of innovative solutions to build sustainable agricultural production
Before you consider applying for an education grant, confirm that you meet these criteria:
Send the WBF granting team a quick email that outlines how your application meets the eligibility criteria and which of the Foundation’s agriculture priority outcomes it meets. Please ensure you include your contact details.
We will call you back to discuss and provide a link to where you can submit your expression of interest.
Since we receive many submissions, your expression of interest does not need to include all the details.
We want to see what the need and context are for a project or program as well as the vision for its impact. We allocate a month for this step.
Your expression of interest will be considered by the Trustees, and if successful you will be invited to submit a full application. At this stage we will provide feedback for any more information we need or want to understand better.
This application is where we want to see the detail of the project including how your organisation is governed, budget breakdowns, timelines and expected outcomes, as well as how you plan to measure, track and assess the success of your project. We also want to see how lived experience is built into the design delivery and evaluation of your approach.
Don’t worry – we give you one month for this step and are happy to answer any questions you have along the way.
Your full application will be considered by the Trustees, and you will be advised of the outcome by email shortly after the meeting. If you’re unsuccessful we will provide specific feedback to help with future applications. If you’re successful, we will be in contact with a grant letter requesting an invoice and banking details, which we need to process a payment.
If you have a multi-year grant from us, we will need to see an acquittal and invoice annually to release payment. We aim to make payments within a month of notifying grantees and future year grants will be released after discussion and review of acquittal form through smartygrants.
We’re happy to hear from you whenever you have something you want us to know and of course if there are any significant changes to the project
We have $875,000 to distribute this year in the Agriculture program.
Grantees can apply for grants of up to $150,000 per year in the Advancing Agriculture program.
We are committed to balancing the long-term strategic needs of the sector with short-term responsiveness, so we will fund a mix of short (1 or 2 years) and longer term (up to 4 years) programs or initiatives, with signature grant longer term partnerships considered by invitation only.
In recent rounds we have seen a trend to apply for the maximum funding amount and term available, while we are able to fund a range of grants within the program the majority will be short and medium term grants with only a handful allocated to the top end of the scale. We encourage you to discuss this with the granting team before you submit an EOI.
Program related Impact Investments may also be considered by the Trustees