The 2026 Ready Communities Impact and Action report – Regions in Transition outlines a range of ways to create sustainable change in regional communities. The following highlights examples across Australia in the area of community financial capital.
Different structures make impact capital available to local communities. Community foundations – of which there are now over 40 across Australia, coordinated by Community Foundations Australia – pool donations into a perpetual endowment and distribute income as local grants, governed by volunteer boards with deep community ties. Prominent regional examples include the Northern Rivers Community Foundation, the Red Earth Foundation in South Burnett, Tomorrow Today in Benalla, Stand Like Stone on the Limestone Coast, and Give Where You Live in Geelong. The 2025 DGR1 reform, which created a new Community Charity category after two decades of advocacy, has significantly expanded these foundations’ capacity to attract donations from private ancillary funds and grant to organisations without their own DGR status. Alongside foundations, regionally anchored family offices and private philanthropic trusts such as the Tim Fairfax Family Foundation, the Siddle Foundation, and the Macdoch Foundation play a distinctive role by deploying patient, values-aligned capital into rural and regional communities over sustained periods, often in partnership with intermediaries like the Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal.
The Bendigo Community Bank model represents a different mechanism: a franchise-style partnership in which locally formed companies share profits with Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, with the community company’s share reinvested through grants and infrastructure. With over 300 branches nationally and $416 million returned to communities since 1998, the model structurally embeds community benefit through local ownership, local shareholders, and local decision-making. These function less as philanthropy and more as a community wealth-building model with commercial underpinnings.
Community-owned assets offer another pathway, particularly through cooperative and trust structures in renewable energy. Australia’s community energy movement now encompasses over 100 community energy groups nationally, with examples including projects like the Hepburn Wind cooperative in Daylesford, which raised $9.9 million from community investors, and the Denmark Community Wind Farm in Western Australia. These projects generate returns that are reinvested locally, and in Hepburn’s case spawned the Z-Net Climate Resilience Fund, which blends capital from the cooperative, local government, and community bank branches to finance decarbonisation projects. Community Special Purpose Vehicles, such as those emerging in the Wimmera to deliver locally built and owned housing, extend the model beyond energy into other asset classes. At the risk capital end of the spectrum, regional angel investor groups are a newer but growing feature of the community capital landscape. Examples of groups operating in Australia include the Regional Angel Investor Network (RAIN), Byron Bay Angels, and the CQ Angel Investors, though most groups remain concentrated in communities with lifestyle-migrant demographics or deliberate institutional support from local government.[i][ii][iii][iv][v][vi][vii][viii][ix][x][xi]
[i] Productivity Commission, Future Foundations for Giving Inquiry Report.
[ii] Philanthropy Australia, A Blueprint to Grow Structured Giving (Philanthropy Australia, 2021), 34, https://www.philanthropy.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Blueprint_to_Grow_Structured_Giving_Report_Final.pdf.
[iii] Dee Rudebeck, ‘DGR Tax Reforms to Bring ‘new Era’ for Community Foundations’, Philanthropy Australia, 7 March 2025, https://www.philanthropy.org.au/news-and-stories/dgr-tax-reforms-to-bring-new-era-for-community-foundations/.
[iv] Nenad Petrovic, ‘Northern Rivers: Working with Community Foundations | .Id’, Working with Community Foundations – a Northern Rivers Case Study, 2023, https://www.id.com.au/insights/articles/working-with-community-foundations-a-northern-rivers-case-study/.
[v] The Ian Potter Foundation, ‘Creating Tomorrow Today – Education Benalla’, Creating Tomorrow Today – Education Benalla, 2023, https://www.ianpotter.org.au/knowledge-centre/case-studies/creating-tomorrow-today.
[vi] Good Shifts, ‘Situating Community Wealth Building and Place Based Capital in the Australian Context’, Situating Community Wealth Building and Place Based Capital in the Australian Context, 28 August 2023, https://medium.com/good-shift/situating-community-wealth-building-and-place-based-capital-in-the-australian-context-28621530a42e.
[vii] Community Foundations Australia, ‘The Opportunity to Partner with Australia’s Community Foundation Network’, 2023, https://engage.dss.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Submission-25624-Community-Foundations-Australia-Redacted.pdf.
[viii] Department of Social Services, ‘Department of Social Services Reforms to Strengthen the Community Sector Summary of Submissions’, 2024, https://engage.dss.gov.au/a-stronger-more-diverse-and-independent-community-sector/.
[ix] Shared Value Project, ‘Case Study – Bendigo Bank’, 2020, https://sharedvalue.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/BendigoBank-CommunityBankCaseStudy-Updated2020.pdf.
[x] Glyn Yates, ‘The Bendigo Bank Community Branch Bank Model Evolves… A Conversation with Glyn Yates’, The Bendigo Bank Community Branch Bank Model Evolves… A Conversation with Glyn Yates, Capital Institute, 2015, https://fieldguide.capitalinstitute.org/bendigo-community-bank-model-part-two.html.
[xi] Capital Institute, ‘The Bendigo Bank Community Model’, The Bendigo Bank Community Model, Capital Institute, 2015, http://fieldguide.capitalinstitute.org/bendigo-community-bank-model-part-one.html.
