The Julia Farr MS McLeod Benevolent Fund (the JFM Fund) wants to make sure all people with disability are included in their communities.
The JFM Fund is committed to supporting the genuine inclusion of people with disability in all communities. This means they are valued contributors to community life, can exercise their personal authority and choice, and have opportunities for growth. However, that’s not the lived experience of many people with disability whose experiences show that current models of inclusion and service provision are not meeting the needs of our diverse disability communities.
Through our grants, we fund work that develops, tests and grows innovation in disability inclusion and will influence policy and practice, beyond the direct impact of the funding.
We fund work that creates new models of inclusion, where people with disability take up valued, contributing roles in communities of their choice. We fund organisations and individuals with great, new and disruptive ideas, supporting their innovation from start-up stage through to scale up. We support new ideas generated by the disability community, and customising and adapting proven models to new contexts.
We want our work to have influence beyond the direct impact of our grant. This means we look for innovations in inclusion with the potential to influence the policy and practice of other agencies. We also understand the need for systemic advocacy, to address the barriers to inclusion that are inherent in policy and systems. We support our sister organisation, JFA Purple Orange, with funding for their policy and advocacy work.
We are interested in working with other funders, to develop best practice in inclusive grant making processes, and to amplify the impact of our resources by co-funding initiatives with other funders.
In late 2023, we asked people with disability what was important to them, and what barriers they experience in building a life of their choosing. They spoke to us about community attitudes and how negative perceptions of disability effectively excluded them from full and equal participation in all aspects of community life. They gave us examples of school teachers stopping them from using assistive technology to communicate and study, of difficulties securing work, of being forced into shared housing arrangements and shared support services and lack of access to community facilities, including issues with accessible transport, physical access to public places and lack of digital access. They talked about challenges securing the supports they need under the NDIS. People with disability also gave us examples of good practice – including in tertiary education, where bespoke access plans and regional hubs supported them to study; technology that supports them to navigate public spaces; and community venues where staff had been trained in supporting visitors with disabilities to fully access facilities and participate in activities.
We reviewed research studies on disability philanthropy that identified only 4% of Australian philanthropic funds go to disability, despite people with disability representing 20% of the Australian population. The research identifies social exclusion as the key driver of social and economic inequality, but of the limited philanthropy going to the sector, the majority of it is directed to welfare services and medical research, not to including people with disability in communities of their choice.
Our funding reflects the needs identified by people with disability themselves, and research studies. It also reflects our organisational values of personhood, citizenhood and capacity building. Our funding operates within the purposes described in our governing document – our deed of settlement.
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The Julia Farr MS McLeod Benevolent Fund (the JFM Fund) wants to make sure all people with disability are included in their communities.
People living with disability should
Many people with disability do not feel they have these things.
We will give money to help change this. These are called grants.
Our grants will help
What we do
We give money to help people with disability have active roles in their communities.
To do this, we give money to
We support new ideas the disability community comes up with.
Our work goes beyond the grants we give.
We make sure
We support our sister organisation, JFA Purple Orange, with funding for their policy and advocacy work.
We are interested in working with other funders to
Why we do it
We asked people with disability
They told us that the barriers were
They gave examples like
There were also good things that help people with disability like
20% of Australians have a disability but only 4% of funds go to disability.
Research shows that people with disability being excluded from their communities is the biggest thing that causes inequality.
However, most funds for disability go to helping with services and medical research.
Our funding goes where people with disability most need it. This is based on