Looking for the latest sector news? Catch up on what’s happening across the world of grants funding and philanthropy with the latest updates from Strategic Grants‘ busy research team.
The expert research team at Strategic Grants spends thousands of hours every month reviewing newsletters, funder websites, LinkedIn and many other sources to find funding opportunities and grants to publish in our Grants Expertise Management System (GEMS), ensuring our clients have a strong and continuously current pipeline of funding prospects.
We’re also in direct contact with many funders and sector leaders, and are continuously searching out the latest information about funding trends and developments in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and across the globe. In the last few months, interesting discussions have been emerging that require grants fundraisers to start actively shifting their approaches, if they haven’t already. We’ve picked out a few of the conversations worth following.
She Gives – Growing Women’s Giving in Australia
She Gives, an Australian movement that celebrates and shares stories of giving by women, has released a major research report drawing on interviews with over 130 women and survey data from more than 2,000 contributors. The report explores six themes from the quantitative and qualitative datasets and delivers three recommendations for growing women’s giving in Australia. With women set to control much of the $5.4 trillion wealth transfer underway, this is a conversation the sector will be having for some time.
Read more:
- Report: She Gives: Growing Women’s Giving in Australia.
- Philanthropy Australia: She Gives publishes landmark report for women’s giving in Australia
- Centre for Social Impact: Women shaping the future of philanthropy in Australia
- Women’s quieter philanthropy making big impact – Community Foundations NZ
The Inaugural Blak Loungeroom National Philanthropy Conference
In April, the Barmal Bijiril Foundation hosted Australia’s first national First Nations philanthropy conference on unceded Kulin Country — a gathering many in the sector have been working toward for years.
Across the program, delegates explored international funding for Indigenous Peoples, Blak leadership shaping what’s next, the case for a National Voice, and models for a National Body.
Read more:
Unlocking Generosity – Minderoo Foundation
I have always liked the saying “you don’t know what you don’t know,” and the Minderoo report explores the potential of wealth and financial advisors imparting their knowledge and advice to clients around philanthropy and giving. Minderoo make the case for upskilling the financial sector so advisors have the current knowledge to help grow giving in Australia — the more people who understand how to give within their country’s tax and wealth structures, the more they will give. A recent US whitepaper from T. Rowe Price, The Generosity Effect, supports these findings and encourages further engagement between advisors and their clients.
Read more:
AI is no longer a future-state conversation
There is no doubt the discussion about Artificial Intelligence in the sector will be an ongoing topic for us all. It’s important to debate and discuss the key issues, concepts, and implementation of AI into service delivery, funding and continuous improvement. Strategic Grants’ Founder and CEO, Jo Garner, is a regular contributor to these discussions and panels. One recent sector roundtable made the point that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel with AI — we need to be better at sharing how it works within the sector.
Read more:
- Research into how AI can assist with grant reporting is explored in this report
Impact investing
Impact investing is reshaping the sector from two directions — as a growing source of capital for for-purpose organisations, and as a way for those same organisations to invest their own reserves with purpose. Growth has been rapid, with an eight-fold increase in value, in Australia, over the past five years. There has been an increase in funding for education, practical tools and capability-building across the sector too.
Impact Investing Australia has created a database of impact investments across a variety of Sustainable Development Goals and asset classes to track who is both receiving and investing funds. The Impact Investing Hub, backed by the Minderoo Foundation, has also just announced a three-year plan to grow capability across the sector.
Read more:
Other reading from around the world
- Decolonising impact measurement: rethinking how we measure change in philanthropy: https://wingswebmembers.org/decolonising-impact-measurement-rethinking-how-we-measure-change-in-philanthropy/
- 2025 Snapshot — Myriad USA: https://myriadusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2025-Snapshot-Myriad-USA.pdf
- A sector in crisis: how U.S. nonprofits and foundations are responding to threats: https://cep.org/report-backpacks/a-sector-in-crisis-how-u-s-nonprofits-and-foundations-are-responding-to-threats/?section=intro
As always, the Strategic Grants team is here to help you navigate the constantly evolving world of grant seeking. Contact our team in Australia or New Zealand if you’d like to talk through what the latest trends and developments might mean for your organisation.
Strategic Grants has the most comprehensive funding data and funding insights in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand collated since 2009 — a sustainable and ever-growing resource that can help inform and enable collaboration and decision making to improve community outcomes for all. Find out more about GEMS (Grants Expertise Management System).
About the author
Gayle Richardson is a Research Coordinator at Strategic Grants with extensive experience in researching funding opportunities and matching prospects to projects and programs for for-purpose organisations. She has worked with local, state, and national organisations, and played a pivotal role in establishing a charity that provides support to mothers with cancer nationwide. Gayle’s expertise spans researching trusts, foundations, ancillary funds, and all grant funding opportunities ensuring the Grants Expertise Management System remains the sector’s most up-to-date resource. With a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Human Services, her career includes public service, employment services, medical research, and the for-purpose sector.