Applications are in
Why do energy prices change?
June 13, 2024
Proposals are in
June 14, 2024
Applications for Impact Campaigns for the 2024-25 democratic budget have closed. We have received 14 amazing applications for projects to drive change in communities. Customer members will decide how the $42,500 fund is allocated in the final vote which launches on Saturday 29 June 2024.
| Name of the organization | Name of the project | A short description of the project | Amount |
| Surfrider Foundation Australia | Save the Southern Sea | We represent regional coastal communities fighting to stop plans for the world’s largest seismic blasting permit in the ecologically significant coastlines of Victoria, Tas and SA. Seismic blasting is the destructive first step in looking for offshore oil & gas and is known to kill and injure marine life from krill to blue pygmy whale that call this place home. The gas from the project would be immediately sent offshore, leaving the communities with everything to lose and nothing to gain. Alongside our wider coastal alliance (including small scale commercial fisherman, community and Traditional Owners), we have made good headwind against the proposal including a 90 day delay and reduction of the size of the project by 3 million hectares. Despite the delay, we expect the approvals to be announced end of June. We have plans to mobilise community when this happens – but we need resources to implement these plans. We’ve seen success in the past in stopping offshore fossil fuel projects through the power of community, but to win this now we will need to throw everything we have at it to make sure this pristine coastline is permanently protected from fossil fuels. | $10,000 |
| Earthworker Energy Manufacturing Cooperative | Energy efficient hot water for Aboriginal Housing Victoria | Everyone deserves to benefit from renewable energy and energy efficiency, not just those who can afford the newest technology. The Earthworker Energy Manufacturing Cooperative manufactures premium quality solar and heat pump hot water products in the Latrobe Valley, and has donated and installed these systems for multiple social housing organisations across Victoria. This project will subsidise the installation of locally made heat pump hot water systems for Aboriginal Housing Victoria – an Aboriginal community organisation that serves to secure appropriate, affordable housing as a pathway to better lives and stronger communities. The project will ensure First Nations households benefit from energy efficiency upgrades, and enable Aboriginal Housing Victoria to improve and electrify social housing stock – helping to reduce power bills and pollution, while supporting local manufacturing. | $10,000 |
| Castlemaine Community Investment Cooperative | Reaching the whole Castlemaine community to build a diverse co-operative membership | Disadvantage and inequality in regional communities is being turbo-charged by outside investors/speculators/multi-nationals extracting profit through real estate, which is driving prices up and sending low-income residents, service workers, and local enterprises out. Our local wealth departs to big cities (and the Cayman Islands) and our community loses say on how it is run. The Castlemaine Community Investment Co-operative will give local people a way to collectively purchase profitable local properties, providing a return on investment, but taking those properties out of the speculative real estate market (making them community owned) for good. The co-operative aims to keep wealth locally to: – tackle economic inequality and profit extraction, and, – ensure our community assets support things we value, for example, locally owned services, fair access to housing, and action on the climate crisis. To be democratic we need to build a diverse membership across our community. We currently have 132 members – and will campaign for broader representation. This project will allow us to print leaflets for our members to distribute to every house in our district and produce an easy-to-read prospectus on our first offer – buying ‘the Hub’ that provides essential climate crisis, environmental and social connection services to our town. |
$1,500 |
| The Bunya Fund (BCCM) | Growing Worker Co-operatives: building economic democracy | Worker co-operatives provide stable employment, promote sustainable practices, and foster solidarity, addressing economic, social, and environmental challenges in our local communities. The Bunya Fund Impact Report 2022–23 (Professor Emmanuel Josserand) found that projects such as KCLC / Care Factor Co-operative, Earthworker Construction Cooperative, and The Northern Australia Aboriginal Kakadu Plum Alliance made strong contributions to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) and the Fund received very positive feedback from participants. With CoPower support, round 3 of The Bunya Fund of the Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals (BCCM) will focus on growing worker co-operatives, aligning with CoPower’s mission for a just and equitable transition to the climate crisis. The Bunya Fund supports new co-ops through funded development services, a Community of Practice, mentoring, and solidarity from BCCM members. Funded by established co-ops, The Bunya Fund builds collective strength as a co-operative movement. The Fund has supported worker co-operatives, including Earthworker Cooperative. Zane Alcorn from Earthworker Construction Co-operative highlighted the impact: “The funding was just — I cannot overstate how useful it was to us.” We would welcome further support from CoPower (a round 1 founding funder) to grow worker co-ops. | $10,000 |
| Seed Indigenous Youth Climate Network | Seed Grassroots Gathering | In October 2024, Seed is hosting a Grassroots Gathering in Naarm/Melbourne, which is a 3-day training camp to engage 20-30 new and existing volunteers nationally. Volunteers will take part in peer-led workshops to build their skills, confidence and awareness around climate justice. This will be our second Grassroots Gathering of the year, which will build the size and capacity of our grassroots network of volunteers. Volunteers will take part in peer-led workshops led by Seed staff and core volunteers that are catered to different knowledge levels. Our peer-to-peer engagement model follows four key ingredients: – Confidence and belief that we can make a difference; – Knowledge of the issue and skills to take action; – Connection to like-minded young people, and; – Opportunities, resources and support to be part of national campaigns that create real world change Seed volunteers are at the heart of what we do. We know that we need a powerful and skilled network of volunteers right across the country to lead meaningful change to protect Country. It’s volunteers who are on the ground, engaging in conversations and implementing strategic (and cheeky) tactics for our campaigns to build climate justice. |
$10,000 |
| Union Aid Abroad – APHEDA | Solar power for women’s cooperative in Palestine | I partnership with Palestinian organisation MA’AN Development Center, we have been implementing a project to build capacities of women’s cooperatives in the food production and processing, supported by funds from Australian government and Australian Education Unions. One of the coops is an organic farming cooperative with 16 women in the village of Deir al Sudan, in Ramallah district. The aims are Palestinian sovereignty over land and food, women’s economic and social empowerment, and resilience against the occupation. When a delegation of Australian trade unionists visited in August 2023, the women showed a demountable on their land they were using for shelter and for food storage, but requested to have solar power, so they are not dependent on running a long electrical line and paying the Israeli company for power. This will transform their cooperative, and assist with labour saving measures. | $10,000 |
| Friends of the Earth Melbourne (Better Buses Campaign) | Bus Network Transformation in Melbourne’s West | Friends of the Earth Melbourne is building power at the grassroots level to work towards transport equity, pushing for more accessible, reliable and sustainable public transport in Melbourne’s diverse western suburbs.Together with local communities, we are calling for a transformation of the broken bus network into a fast, frequent and connected grid of clean, electric buses that run every 10 minutes all day, every day.Over the past two years, we have organised many community forums, actions, and rallies. We have shared countless stories through video, news and magazines. We have built strong relationships with the community and lobbied politicians to raise the issue in parliament. Our work has put Better Buses on the agenda in parliament, and for advocacy groups such as Committee for Melbourne, Infrastructure Victoria and Leadwest. We plan to increase the pressure towards upcoming elections, working with local leaders, and supporting them to grow action groups to develop strategies informed by lived experience. Storytelling will also remain a key part of our work, humanising this issue and building understanding through a videography series, and connecting locals with journalists to ensure the wider community joins the call for greater transport equity in our city. | $10,000 |
| Renters and Housing Union | Fight for the Future! | Climate Change is becoming a bigger and bigger issue facing renters. Extreme temperatures, poor insulation, high bills are causing renters to face stress and illness on a growing scale. It is predicted that there will be 1000+ heat related deaths per year in Australian capital cities by 2050.
RAHU has been holding workshops providing renters with the skills they need to stand up and assert their rights for safer, energy efficient, comfortable, climate change prepared housing. The Fight for the Future! Project aims to hold more workshops, more often, and in new areas. The aim of this project is two-fold: – a $500 per month honorarium for a campaigns coordinator – printing and advertising – covering participation costs for members As one of Australia’s fastest growing unions – our membership has doubled to over 1,500 over the past year – RAHU is well placed to do this work. |
$10,000 |
| Unionists for a Job Guarantee | Green Job Guarantee Forum | If Australia is to navigate a pathway away from austerity, the union movement must play a central role. The union movement’s capacity to influence workers and progressive social movements, in addition to the strategic role it plays within the Labor Party, gives it special importance. Unionists for a Job Guarantee is a new group focused on bringing together all forces in the Labor movement opposed to austerity. As a first step, Unionists for a Job Guarantee is seeking $2,000 to hold a forum and workshops in late 2024 / early 2025. The forum will be focused on replacing the government’s neoliberal economic agenda with a policy framework aimed at providing an environmentally sustainable and socially useful job to everyone who wants one – a “Green Job Guarantee”. In the lead-up to forum, the group will hold online and in-person workshops to prepare for the conference. We believe that recent international social movements fighting austerity by demanding governments create environmentally sustainable jobs for all (Green New Deal in the US, or the Green Job Guarantee in the Europe Union) has created a fertile ground for a similar movement to be built in Australia. |
$2,000 |
| Arena Publications | Converging Cooperatives | Converging Cooperatives is to be a series of reporting and research on current cooperative projects. We will send writer-researchers to various Australian coops that are bound up with building new and just economic relations in the context of intensifying eco-social crises. Our research would focus on the process of collective/co-operative developments: how did they come together, processes of development, project creation, dispute resolution, reaction to change etc. We would also look at the class and social background of the participants, and the social networks and contexts from which they came to such collective projects. One purpose of this research would be to reflect on ways in which such cooperatives could take the ‘next step’. Is this by expansion of said organisations? Or by maintaining a certain limit, and budding off new ones. What forms of state re-regulation would be necessary – in terms of planning, industrial process, intellectual property etc – to create a process of such organisations developing outwards into the wider social space, with a view to become an alternative process of life, to which larger numbers of people had access, without the total commitment to communes and communities of earlier decades? |
$5,000 |
| EarthWorker Cooperative | Keep the Change Coffee Cooperative | Keep the Change is a new initiative of Earthworker Cooperative. We aim to consolidate a co-operatively run, climate-friendly, organic coffee growing and ethical distribution supply chain between organized farmers in Timor Leste, organized labour and coffee outlets in Australia. Coffee is Timor Leste’s most important cash crop but farmers have largely been exploited by profit seeking traders and the global coffee cartel to keep farm gate prices persistently low. We aim to improve growers’ returns and infrastructure by supporting their co-operatives through opening up distribution channels in Australia, cultivated through the spirit of solidarity, social and ecological/climate justice. We are seeking seed funding to bring coffee farmer representatives from Timor Leste to Australia for the following purposes: • a roundtable working and networking meeting with unions, faith organisations, potential ethical coffee distributors, peak bodies and movement building organisations • piloting a distribution network in Melbourne • exposure visits to study renewable energy initiatives of Earthworker Co-op and other energy transition and regenerative agriculture practices in Victoria The grant will be matched through our on-going fundraising efforts to assist farmers with buying materials to better prepare coffee beans for the market. |
$10,000 |
| CoPower | Investing in Community Owned Renewable Energy Systems | CoPower will invest in community owned solar, wind and battery projects to support renewable energy transition and build up a portfolio of assets that can provide return on investment to support the cooperatives mission into the future. | $9,000
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| CoPower | Striking Workers Fund | Over the year CoPower will donate to workers taking strike action to stand up for good jobs and respect. | $1,000
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| CoPower | Fighting Climate Crimes Fund | Over the year directs funds towards important climate mobilisations like School Strike for Climate and cover the living and legal costs of environmental activists in Australia risking their lives and livelihoods. | `$2,500 |
