I acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the East Kulin Nation, and pay my respects to Elders past and present. I acknowledge the First Nations leaders who are part of this community foundations movement, including Warren Miller and the Indigenous‑led funds whose work is helping show Australia a better way to share resources and power.
It is a pleasure to be here with Community Foundations Australia's outgoing CEO Ian Bird, incoming co‑CEOs Georgia Mathews and Dylan Smith, board chair Stacey Thomas and board members, and Bharat Mehta and Jenny Hodgson from the Global Fund for Community Foundations. My thanks to John Spierings and our hosts from the South Side Community Foundation and the Australian Communities Foundation. Thanks to everyone in the room who has spent years building one of Australia's most patient forms of optimism.
Tonight, I want to tackle a big question.
What should our vision be for community foundations in 10 years' time?
What is the kind of Australian community we'd like to see in 2036?
How would our country be different if every major town had a trusted local foundation?
If more suburbs, regions, First Nations communities and identity‑based groups had a vehicle for gathering resources and backing local solutions?
That is the possibility before us. But to understand the future, it helps to begin with the work already happening.
So I want to talk about 3 places: Benalla, Alice Springs and the Burnett Inland.
In the spirit of respecting the home team advantage, let's start with Benalla.
In 2007, the Dropping off the Edge report identified Benalla as one of Victoria's most disadvantaged communities. It showed the links between early school leaving, low literacy, weak qualifications and disadvantage across a life course.
Tomorrow Today treated the report as a call to action. Its founding chair, Liz Chapman, saw education as the key. But the foundation understood that education did not belong only to schools. Children learn in families, classrooms, sporting clubs, workplaces and the expectations adults hold for them.
So Tomorrow Today did what community foundations can do at their best. It convened. It listened. It gathered evidence. It built trust. It asked school principals, local government, health services, researchers, families and community groups to work together.
The result was the Education Benalla Program: a 20‑year effort to lift education completion rates for young people in Benalla to equal or exceed the Victorian average.
This was a whole‑of‑community effort. Tomorrow Today brought together 124 local groups, organisations and agencies. The results are tangible: hundreds of young people mentored by trained volunteers, a major increase in work experience placements, thousands of hours contributed by Reading Buddy volunteers and improvements in measures of early childhood development.
Tomorrow Today helped a community move from diagnosis to action.
And it showed why community foundations are so powerful: they are close enough to understand the problem and durable enough to stay with the solution.
The second story takes us from Benalla to Mparntwe Alice Springs, and from education to the civic power of local storytelling.
During COVID, the Centralian Advocate closed. For Alice Springs, that meant more than the loss of a masthead. It meant the loss of a shared civic space: a place that reported sporting triumphs, council debates, volunteer milestones, small business openings and the occasional letter to the editor written in the grand tradition of Australian civic indignation.
A local paper gives a town a mirror. It helps a community see its own effort, generosity and possibility.
In Mparntwe Alice Springs, a group of locals decided to act. Led by local businesswoman and social investor Libby Prell, they began exploring how to attract a new newspaper to the town.
After conversations with independent publishing experts and The Today Group, they landed on an ingenious idea. They would establish a community foundation. The foundation would support positive community change over the long term, with the newspaper as an early flagship project. It would commit to a page of advertising each week, helping provide the threshold support needed for the paper to begin.
With guidance from Community Foundations Australia, the Mparntwe Alice Springs Community Foundation was established in May 2023 - the first community foundation in the Northern Territory. After setting up its board and partnering with the Foundation for Rural Regional Renewal, the foundation held its first successful fundraiser. Nine weeks later, Centralian Today was launched.
Each week, the foundation features positive stories in Centralian Today to encourage, support and amplify community action. Its aim is to help build a stronger community for a shared future. In recent weeks, it has covered the death of Kumanjayi Little Baby, and the nationwide vigils that saw thousands turn out in pink to honour her.
A community foundation can fund programs, steward donations, build endowments and strengthen local voice. It can also give people a trusted structure for asking larger questions. Over time, the foundation intends to turn to other areas of community development.
The third story takes us to Queensland's Burnett Inland, a vast region covering North Burnett, South Burnett and Cherbourg Aboriginal Shire.
The region stretches across 28,000km2. Its economy is shaped by agriculture and mining. Its communities face pressures familiar to many regional areas: young people leaving for work or study, population change, energy transition, and the difficulty of planning for the long term when many institutions operate on much shorter cycles.
Red Earth Community Foundation has served the Burnett Inland since 2013, including through its annual Community Leadership Program.
In recent years, it has asked the question: what future did the Burnett Inland want for itself? It consulted widely across the community, worked with local government and industry, secured support from Stanwell's South Burnett Resilience Fund, and commissioned the Rural Economies Centre of Excellence to prepare the Burnett Inland Futures Report.
That report did something that good community work often does. It gave shape to trends that people had sensed but not always named. It showed the risk of a region being hollowed out as younger people left. It highlighted the limits of short planning cycles. It made the case for a backbone structure that could help the region keep working towards shared goals.
There is a lovely phrase from Red Earth Chair Georgie Somerset, who described the foundation as a vehicle to empower the region to create and fulfil its preferred destiny.
That is the spirit of community foundations.
They are vehicles for preferred destinies.
And in an era when many communities feel that decisions are made far away, that practical work is precious.
A community foundation can create a table around which others gather.
It can keep memory when personnel change.
It can hold a long horizon when politics, media and funding cycles reward the immediate.
Benalla, Alice Springs and the Burnett Inland are different places with different challenges. Yet they show the same pattern.
Community foundations help communities notice their own strength.
They help local people make better use of local knowledge.
They help donors and governments put trust closer to the ground.
That is why this movement is vital to rebuilding Australia's social capital.
In Reconnected, Nick Terrell and I documented the long decline in Australian community engagement in the decades up to 2020. We wrote about the fall in volunteering, joining, friendships, and trust.
Released this month, the latest figures from the General Social Survey suggest the problem has continued.
Volunteering through organisations is down since 2019. Participation in social groups, community support groups, civic groups and political groups have all declined. Trust has also fallen: only half of Australians now agree that most people can be trusted.
With social capital eroding, we need institutions that rebuild it.
We need more places where Australians gather around shared purpose.
We need structures that help local generosity become durable.
We need ways for people to act together without waiting for permission from a distant institution.
That is what community foundations do.
For many years, community foundations in Australia operated with a structural handicap. The old framework made it harder for local foundations to attract certain kinds of support and harder to direct resources to grassroots organisations that lacked deductible gift recipient status.
The sector lived with a frustrating contradiction. Community foundations were trusted locally, but the national rules did not fully recognise the way they worked.
That has changed.
Our government created the community charity deductible gift recipient category so that community foundations could have a more suitable home in the tax system.
Earlier this year, we declared dozens of additional community foundations as community charities, allowing them to seek deductible gift recipient endorsement from the tax office. That was the biggest update to the category since it was established in 2024. It meant community foundations across Australia could move from advocacy to activation.
I want to acknowledge the many people who helped get that reform to this point.
Community Foundations Australia has been assiduous. Philanthropy Australia has been persistent and principled. Community foundations across the country brought practical insight from the front line. Treasury, the tax office and the Australian Charities and Not‑for‑profits Commission worked carefully through the design. Herbert Smith Freehills contributed legal expertise. Local leaders spent hours on applications, conversations and details.
Last week's Budget gives community foundations the next reform they need. Subject to the passage of legislation, we will remove the ministerial declaration requirement as the gateway for community charity deductible gift recipient endorsement.
The standards stay high. The process gets simpler.
Community charities will meet the rules. Regulators will assess compliance. Good governance and public accountability will remain central.
But the model has earned a clearer path. The category is established. The regulators understand the task. A local foundation that satisfies the law should be able to move through the regulatory system directly.
This means clearer pathways, faster decisions, better use of donors' goodwill, and more resources flowing to the communities ready to put them to work.
Community foundations have shown what they can do. Now we are giving the model more room to grow.
This is part of a larger goal: doubling philanthropic giving by 2030.
That goal will require generosity from those with substantial wealth. As the Productivity Commission's report made clear, it will require better giving vehicles, stronger foundations, more bequests, and a culture in which giving is normal rather than exceptional.
Our government has already adopted practical reforms, including boosting the minimum distribution amount for Giving Funds, and scrapping the $2 donation deduction threshold to encourage round up for charity efforts.
It will also require more doors into philanthropy.
Community foundations can be one of those doorways.
They can be the place where someone makes a first gift and discovers that generosity is habit‑forming.
They can be the place where a family starts talking about what they want their wealth to do after they are gone.
They can be the place where a small business invests in the town that has supported it.
That is why the 10‑year vision is so exciting.
Canada now has more than 200 community foundations. That shows what is possible when community foundations become part of the civic landscape.
Imagine if Australia did the same: creating 4 new community foundations for every one that exists today.
A network of 200 Australian community foundations would change the texture of giving in this country.
It would mean more communities with a permanent local asset.
It would mean more towns able to receive a bequest from someone who loved the place and wanted that love to keep working.
It would mean more local organisations able to find a partner who understands the terrain.
Social capital is like physical infrastructure in one respect: it is easier to maintain than to rebuild after collapse. Once a bridge fails, the repair is expensive. Once trust fails, the repair is harder still.
Community foundations are builders of social capital. They give people a reason to come together, a structure for pooling resources, and a mechanism for turning love of place into practical action.
That is why Ian Bird's contribution has been so significant.
Ian, tonight is a chance to say publicly what many people in this room already know: you have transformed community foundations in Australia.
You arrived with deep Canadian experience, but you never treated Australia as a branch office of someone else's model. You listened. You asked questions. You walked alongside communities. You helped this network become more confident, more connected, more ambitious and more international.
Stacey has said that under your leadership, Community Foundations Australia evolved from a traditional peak body into a dynamic, future‑fit organisation. You brought Australian community philanthropy into global conversations that had too often happened around us rather than with us. You strengthened the network's collective voice.
And you did all this with the rare Canadian gift of being both polite and relentless.
In fact, I would argue that no‑one who claims to be born in Canada has had a bigger impact on our national fabric since founding father King O'Malley.
Admittedly, that depends on believing King O'Malley was born in Canada. O'Malley himself certainly believed it whenever section 44 was nearby. Some historians have their doubts. Still, in the charitable spirit of tonight, let us give King O'Malley the benefit of the doubt and Ian the undisputed title.
Unlike O'Malley, Ian's Canadian credentials can survive a basic records check.
Ian, you have given this movement energy, clarity and momentum. You have helped create a stronger platform for the next chapter. You have shown that international experience is most valuable when it deepens local confidence rather than replacing it.
As you return to Canada, I hope you know that your work here will continue in communities you have visited, in relationships you have strengthened, in reforms you have helped unlock, and in the confidence of a movement that now knows its own power.
We wish you and your family every happiness in the next chapter. We also look forward to seeing you back in Australia, because the great thing about Canada is that it is a long way away, but apparently not quite far enough to keep Ian Bird from another community foundations gathering.
And as Ian prepares to hand over, we also wish Georgia Mathews and Dylan Smith every success as co‑CEOs.
Their appointment is itself a statement about the values of this movement. Shared leadership is not always the easiest model. Anyone who has served in a cabinet, on a board or on a school fete committee knows that shared leadership can require patience, tact, humility and an unusually high tolerance for calendar invitations.
But done well, it reflects something deeply important: power can be distributed without being diluted.
Georgia and Dylan have worked alongside this network and alongside each other for many years. Their appointment speaks to trust, continuity, energy and the next stage of growth. I wish them every success. They inherit a movement with momentum, and a responsibility to keep making this network broader, deeper, more inclusive and more useful to communities across Australia.
So let me close with the larger hope.
Ten years from now, I hope community foundations are part of the ordinary architecture of Australian life.
A trusted place where people can give locally.
A durable institution that keeps serving a community long after the first donation is made.
A bridge between local generosity and lasting change.
A practical way for Australians to turn care into shared strength.
That is the promise of this movement.
It gives communities a stronger voice in their own future.
It helps local knowledge attract lasting resources.
It makes philanthropy feel closer and more open.
And it rebuilds social capital in the most Australian way: through people backing the places and communities they love.
If the next decade sees community foundations grow from a promising movement into a national habit, Australia will be stronger for it.
May this be the decade when local giving comes of age.
May this be the decade when more Australians see philanthropy as something within their reach and community foundations as the place where their generosity can help build a stronger, kinder country.
