City of Ballarat finalises City Partnerships Program

The City of Ballarat will deliver more than $900,000 in partnership funding in the 2023/24 financial year after finalising the recipients of its City Partnerships Program.

Twelve organisations were successful in receiving the funding, with more than $2 million over the next three financial years to be delivered through the approved partnerships.

The City Partnerships Program exists to facilitate partnership agreements with organisations or businesses that help fund projects or programs that deliver on Council-identified priorities.

City Partnerships are for well-planned projects and programs which may occur over multiple financial years. They are designed to be awarded to well-established organisations that have a proven record of delivering relevant programs, projects, or activities.

City of Ballarat Mayor, Cr Des Hudson said the awarding of the partnership funding was a fantastic way to help the Ballarat community, while at the same time delivering the goals as outlined in the City of Ballarat's Council Plan 2021-2025.

"The successful partnerships will provide an enormous benefit to the City of Ballarat and the organisations themselves are all integral in serving the City," Cr Hudson said.

"We are proud to be able to provide the funding to see them thrive but to also help us deliver our goals that we set out as a Council.

"There were a lot of extremely worthy applications and although we are not able to fund them all, we thank everybody who made submissions."

There are two streams of partnership available as part of the City Partnerships Program; Community stream and Commercial stream.

For recipients of multi-year funding agreements, submitters will initially receive their first year of funding and will only receive further payments once they provide documented evidence of how they have met agreed key milestones.

The partnership process was determined by the City Partnerships Delegated Committee in accordance with adopted policy for the program, and the minutes from the City Partnerships Committee meeting will formally be included in the agenda at the July Council Meeting.

The successful partnership applications were as follows: