2021 Grants

ActionAid Australia

Project: Women on the Frontlines of Climate Action, Kenya
Grant amount: $50,000

ActionAid empowers local women’s organisations around the world to design and lead programs focused on three areas:

• Climate Justice – supporting women who are being hit hardest by climate change to adapt and respond despite having done the least to cause the problem
• Economic Justice – working to increase women’s access to resources and a decent living
• Women’s Rights in Emergencies – supporting the leadership of women most impacted to turn crisis into an opportunity to lead response efforts and make long term progress for gender equality

The Capricorn Foundation is supporting an ActionAid project in Kenya. Climate change is having a devastating impact in Kenya, causing a vicious cycle of floods and droughts that is destroying crops, leaving communities with not enough food to eat and nothing to sell for income. This project will empower women to lead their communities to adapt to climate change, with a focus on building sustainable livelihoods, protecting their rights and influencing decisions that impact their resilience to climate disaster.

Children’s Ground

Project: Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe (Children’s Ground)
Grant Amount: $50,000

Children’s Ground works within a community over a 25-year period to support First Nations people to address issues that perpetuate disadvantage including lack of access to education and employment opportunities. It builds on the ability, strength and culture of the communities of the First Nations people.

The Children’s Ground approach involves wrap around support and activities across 5 platform areas: Learning & Wellbeing, Health & Wellbeing, Community Development & Wellbeing, Economic Development & Wellbeing and Creative & Cultural Development & Wellbeing.

The Capricorn Foundation is supporting early childhood learning in a towncamp outside of Alice Springs as well as work creating employment opportunities for community members to gain experience as educators.

Community Resources Limited

Project: Green Connect and Good Gardens Initiative
Grant Amount: $25,000

Green Connect is a not-for-profit social enterprise run by Community Resources. It creates jobs for young people and former refugees in Wollongong NSW, in industries that help the community and the planet. Green Connect runs one of the largest urban permaculture farms in the world, operates a standalone op shop, provides zero waste services to large events and businesses, and contracts staff out to other businesses and industries through its staffing solutions arm. It also provides training and support to enable its staff to use their employment experience at Green Connect as a springboard into sustainable and fulfilling jobs and careers.

The Capricorn Foundation is supporting Green Connect to launch a fifth business arm, offering gardening and landscaping services to commercial and residential customers in a way that creates jobs and enhances biodiversity and environmental sustainability.

Kids Under Cover

Project: Partnering to Prevent Youth Homelessness in the Wake of COVID-19
Grant Amount: $20,000

Kids Under Cover envisions an Australia where no young person in our community is homeless. Working in partnership with over 60 community service organisations, it delivers an early intervention approach to preventing youth homelessness by providing relocatable studio accommodation and scholarships for at-risk and homeless young people.

The Capricorn Foundation is supporting Kids Under Cover in 2021 by co-funding a project to divert two young people from homelessness by building a two-bedroom studio. This funding will also enable Kids Under Cover to provide 40 Education Scholarships to young people residing in the studios and their siblings, re-connecting them to education and/or training.

The Man Cave

Project: Man Cave TV and Man Cave Academy
Grant Amount: $50,000

The Man Cave is a preventative mental health and emotional intelligence non-profit that empowers boys to become great men.

It exists because suicide is the leading cause of death for Australian men aged 15-44. Not only that, more than 1 woman dies every week at the hands of a man, and most of the time this is a man they’re close with. The Man Cave believes these statistics are preventable through early intervention programs.

Using evidence-based workshops and expert facilitation, its programs provide boys aged 12-16 with the critical emotional and social skills they need to lead flourishing lives for themselves, their relationships and their communities.

The Capricorn Foundation is supporting the acceleration of Man Cave Digital – an initiative that distils Man Cave programs into two ongoing online offerings: Man Cave TV and Man Cave Academy.

Australian Wildlife Conservancy

Project: Partnership conservation land management on Dambimangari Country
Grant Amount: $240,000 over three years

As the largest private not-for-profit owner and manager of land for conservation in Australia, Australian Wildlife Conservancy’s mission is the effective conservation of all Australian animal species and the habitats in which they live.

The traditional lands of the Dambimangari People, Dambimangari Country in the north-west Kimberley, Western Australia, is an area of international conservation significance. The region includes a large proportion of the only area of mainland Australia to have suffered no animal extinctions since European settlement. It is home to some of the last remaining populations of species such as the Brush-tailed Rabbit-rat, the Kimberley Brush-tailed Phascogale and the Nabarlek.

The Capricorn Foundation is supporting a landmark partnership between AWC and the Dambimangari Aboriginal Corporation (DAC), to deliver conservation land management across 800,000 hectares of Dambimangari Country. Together, AWC and DAC will deliver land management operations – including fire management, feral animal control and weed control – informed by world-class conservation science and Indigenous knowledge, designed to increase populations of threatened and declining species and deliver socioeconomic benefits to the Dambimangari People.

Documentary Australia Foundation

Project: STANDING ON THE SOiLUTION
Grant Amount: $100,000 over two years

Film director and actress Rachel Ward is the last person you’d expect to join a farming revolution.

Following the birth of her first grandchild, Rachel was confronted head-on by the impact of our climate crisis as the Black Summer fires descended on her farm.

Faced with the realisation that she could no longer offset responsibility for the planet’s peril, she is discovering that across Australia, and around the world, a quiet revolution is underway.

In a triumphant feature documentary, STANDING ON THE SOiLUTION, Rachel voyages from her own wilful ignorance of the ecological impacts of conventional agriculture, to championing a movement that embraces the Indigenous concept of ‘caring for country’ and aims to restore the health of Australia’s farmland, food, climate, and ourselves.

The Capricorn Foundation is supporting WildBear Entertainment and New Town Films’ production of STANDING ON THE SOiLUTION and an associated impact campaign aiming to inform, inspire, empower and activate audiences.

Odonata Foundation

Project: The Great Australian Platypus Search
Grant Amount: $70,000

In January 2021, the platypus was listed as threatened in Victoria for the first time ever; in response to this announcement, the Odonata Foundation established The Great Australian Platypus Search.

Kicking off in Victoria in August 2021, The Great Australian Platypus Search is a citizen science project that is using an innovative wildlife detection technique known as environmental DNA (eDNA). Collected via water samples from 2,000 sites across the state, this data will allow scientists to develop a comprehensive map of platypus populations across Victoria.

This initiative is set to be one of the biggest citizen science projects in the world and is gathering never-before-seen data on one of the world’s most elusive species. The platypus is an Australian icon and an important indigenous species, and this project provides people with an opportunity to play an important role in protecting the platypus, aquatic wildlife and Australian waterways for many years to come.

Greenpeace Australia Pacific

Project: REenergise – shifting corporate Australia to 100% renewable electricity by 2025
Grant Amount: $90,000

Ensuring Australia’s largest energy users switch from fossil fuels to renewables is a critical component of Greenpeace Australia Pacific’s long-term goal to drive the transition to 100% renewable energy in Australia by 2025.

In late 2019, Greenpeace launched a corporate engagement campaign, REenergise, calling on big businesses to leave coal, oil and gas in the past and transition to purchasing 100% renewable energy for their operations.

Despite the highly challenging context of the global pandemic, REenergise has already shifted ten – out of a goal of fifteen – of Australia’s major corporate energy users to adopt 100% clean energy by 2025 or sooner (including Telstra, Bunnings, Coles, Woolworths, ALDI Australia, Coca Cola Amatil, Lion, Asahi and others). ALDI is notable for already having achieved its objective, six months early, in June 2021. These commitments have led to and culminated in the direct abatement of more than 6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

The Mulloon Institute

Project: Co-educational workshops with Back to country
Grant Amount: $25,000

The Mulloon Institute (TMI) is leading the way for agricultural land regeneration in creating water and food security through enhancing healthy ecosystems. TMI educates farmers and land managers in rehydration, restoration and regeneration of landscapes to create a resilient Australian agricultural sector.

With support from the Capricorn Foundation, TMI is hosting a co-educational workshop with Back to Country, an Aboriginal cultural organisation formed by Yuin Elders. Young Yuin men known as the Gurundgi will educate TMI on connection to country and cultural drivers to landscape repair. In return, TMI will share skills in identifying areas appropriate for landscape rehydration as well as the planning and design of landscape rehydration and erosion control measures. Through this co-educational project, TMI staff will be able to share their knowledge of landscape rehydration while the Gurundgi can demonstrate the importance of cultural connections to Country.