Thinking Laterally:
How a wider view of your organisation can help you in the search for grants

Most community groups think of themselves as having boundaries, categorising their work in terms of the field they're working in - animal welfare, arts and culture, children, families, community development, education, etc.

While it's a good thing to have a clear idea of your mission and your goals it's also a good idea to take another look at your self-imposed boundaries and see if you're not selling yourself short. Just because you do one thing well doesn't mean that you're not doing other things as well; and it may well be easier to get funding for those other things. All it takes is a little lateral thinking.

Step 1: Think outside the square

When your organisation is looking for funding from grantmakers - governments, foundations, councils, etc. - it pays to take a wide and generous view of your operations. There may be aspects of what you do that are of interest to others.

If you're a sporting organisation, for example, your main aim is to get the team out there on the arena every weekend. But if you take a more detached look at what you're actually achieving you could say that your club is:

• Building community spirit
• Working with young people
• Maintaining community facilities
• Strengthening local identity
• Promoting a health and wellbeing message
• Promoting an anti-drugs message
• Providing leadership training for young people
• Promoting teamwork and communications skills
• Providing a safe forum for young people to interact
• Encouraging tolerance and understanding between people of different cultural backgrounds.

By broadening your thinking, you can open up access to health, youth, anti-drug, multicultural, indigenous and training funding programs, to name just a few.

Take another look

A sporting club is just an example but it is worth looking again at your own organisation to see exactly how many different sectors of the community you actually provide benefits for - and how you do it. If you are a health group providing benefits to people of all ages...

• Have you looked at grants that are open to groups providing programs for children?
• For youth?
• For seniors?
• For people in regional areas?
• For people from a non-English speaking background?
• Do you have a health solution that can be expanded to other parts of the state or across Australia?
• Do you provide training opportunities?

If you answer yes to any of these questions then there might just be other organisations out there that want to promote those aims, and they may be able to pay you to do them.

Breaking new ground

You should also take the time to see how far you can extend your areas of common interest with the grantmakers. You may consider what new audiences or groups you could involve in your organisation's activities. Could you get credit and funding if you reached out to different groups? Could you involve older or younger people? Indigenous people? People at risk of mental illness? People with disabilities?

There are also things that you can do with your current membership that could bring you into the area of interest of other sets of grantmakers. Continuing the sports club example, does your club have a policy on:

• Reducing alcohol use?
• Increasing sun protection?
• Reducing injury?
• Including people with disabilities?
• Removing discrimination against gay and lesbian people?
• Promoting greater religious and multicultural tolerance?

There are groups prepared to fund all these things, and they may be able to help you if they can see that your project or program will lead to a changed attitude or behaviour in the community or help to promote such an outcome.

Step 2: Casting your net

In order to benefit from the interest of grantmakers, you need to find out what opportunities exist in all the areas you overlap. Grants funding often falls under one of the following categories:

• Animals
• Arts & Culture
• Children & Family
• Community Services & Development
• Disability
• Economic Development
• Education, Employment & Training
• Emergency & Safety
• Environment Conservation & Heritage
• Faith & Spirituality
• General Community Grants
• Health & Wellbeing
• Indigenous
• Infrastructure
• International
• Multicultural
• Older People
• Rural & Regional Development
• Science & Technology
• Sport & Recreation
• Women
• Youth

The primary purpose of your group will probably fall under one of those headings - but there's no reason to stop there. If you're working for health through sport for young multicultural women, that's five headings right there that you can search under: HEALTH, SPORT, YOUTH, MULTICULTURAL and WOMEN. If you're providing any sort of training, you could also make a strong argument for CAPACITY BUILDING and LEADERSHIP grants. If what you're doing is fundraising to fix your premises in an old building, that may well be HERITAGE. If you're doing it in the country, that's RURAL - and so on.

A great way to find funding sources is to call on the services of www.ourcommunity.com.au. You can subscribe to the Easy Grants newsletter and access the online grant search database.

Why not you?

The secret to successful grantseeking is twofold - careful execution of projects, yes, but also lateral thinking about possibilities and thinking how the values of your group or project correspond with the values of the granting body.

Stranger organisations than yours have got grants from more unexpected sources for odder things - the difference is that they have known what grants schemes are available and have thought outside the square about their standing in the wider community.