How can we better equip community groups and leaders with the governance capabilities and funding needs to activate projects within their community?
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Across Greater Melbourne, communities want more say in how money flows into their neighbourhoods, but traditional funding and governance systems often make this slow, bureaucratic and inequitable. This project is testing a new way to do participatory grant making, to shift decision-making power closer to communities. Working with The Wellbeing Protocol, we are piloting hum.community (hum), a participatory grant-making app that allows local people to collectively decide how funding is allocated in their area. Experimenting with a practical tool which redirects capital and unlocks community agency - thereby enabling communities to decide, fund and activate what matters most in their place, together. Over 18 months, we've launched live pilots across diverse neighbourhoods to test how capital can move directly toward community-led regeneration. Our learnings from the first set of prototypes can be found within our first report and our second cohort of prototypes is underway, expanding to up to ten communities. Through this second pilot we are aggregating learning in order to influence new ways of moving money, with capital holders across Greater Melbourne.
We support community organisations to run participatory funding pilots, connect as a cohort, unlock diverse funding pathways, and capture and share learning to strengthen the evidence base for locally led decision-making. We then use this evidence to influence other capital holders to inspire new ways of resourcing change.
We are currently working with our second cohort of communities: some funding-ready, others voting or still co-designing. Early signs of increased agency, connection and activity are emerging. From here we will be seeking further cohort and community-level funding to grow and deepen the funded community activities.
Launched first prototypes of the Hum App with three community organisations
The Village Zero received $5,000 from Community Bank Sandringham
Complete first successful trial with Village Zero
Hosted Sharing Webinar and Launched Enabling a Thriving Civic Life: Trialling Distributed Grant Making With the Wellbeing Protocol Report
Launched second cohort of communities
Inner North Community Foundation Received $30,000 to use in their community trial of Hum
The Community Grocer received $20,000 from Vic Health for the trial of Hum
Guildford Lane received $2,000 from various funders for their trial of Hum
Research, guides, and stories from the work underway.
