Our community, Ceduna/Far West, is a place where there are over 75 services and an experience of being done to, but rarely alongside or with. It's also a place where there's division in the community. We are a community of 3,500 people living on the edge of the Nullarbor. Our Town Ceduna/Far West has a deep commitment to improving wellbeing and connection, and supporting local self-forming, self-supporting groups. 

Against this backdrop Our Town Ceduna/Far West wanted to do something different, something that put our community back in the driver's seat. We made the decision to use community grants as a way of engaging various parts of our community. For us, community grants are a way of making sure that community are the ones innovating and coming up with ideas instead of our team being the ones telling people what they want. It was a strategic decision to launch the community grants as one of our first activities as a way of bringing more people into Our Town and helping our community better understand what Our Town is, how it works, and what it is trying to achieve here in Ceduna/Far West. 

Designing our community grant’s was a six month process. We tested and prototyped everything, from the name, to the application questions, to the yarning process. The reason we were able to sit in that prototyping phase for longer is partly because of the coaching support we receive from The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, and partly because this is a long term initiative (10 years).

However, we recognise, and have experienced for ourselves in previous roles and programs, that having the time to sit in and be supported through that process isn’t usually the case. So we wanted to share some of our big takeaways and the steps we felt were really central to our process in the hopes it might be useful to anyone else, especially those in rural and regional community that might be thinking about your own community grants.

A big thank you to all the people that have prototyped, tested and shared their own practices when it comes to participatory grant-making and whose learnings informed our own process, we are so pleased to be able to share back and look forward to sharing our learnings from working with our community.