Backing Young People
Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation Annual Report 2021
Foyer Foundation
Approved in 2025
$11.4m
approved *
31
grants
$1.15m
average VFFF Board
grant size
84%
in multi-year grants
69%
to regional areas
22%
to core and capacity grants
24%
Queensland
47%
New South Wales
29%
National
* A total of $12.6m in grants were approved, with $1.2m of grant commitments cancelled or returned in FY25
Backing Young People
Full Strategy Reflections
In June 2026, VFFF concluded its five-year Backing Young People strategy. From FY21 – FY26, Directors approved 54 grants, totalling just over $40 million, and the strategy encompassed four focus areas seeking to advance young people’s independence, social purpose, and future security: Contributing to Society, Decent Work, Caring for the Environment, and Exploring Christian Faith and Values. Over these five years, nearly 60% of our grantmaking supported young people in rural and regional areas across NSW and QLD.
As a Foundation whose history spans more than six decades of granting in Australia, we are committed to continually strengthening our approach through listening and learning, building trusted relationships, and working towards shared impact.
One of the clearest reflections reinforced over this period is that effective philanthropy begins with strong, values-aligned relationships.
VFFF’s Strategic Lenses have provided us with a clear and consistent framework for identifying partners that share our values, while enabling us to honour the legacy of our Founders and respond to changing social contexts.
Trust-based partnerships require a relational approach that recognises each organisation’s unique circumstances and extends beyond financial support. Flexibility, openness, and a willingness to listen have been essential to building partnerships capable of sustaining meaningful impact.
Strategic responsiveness – rather than considering our framework as fixed – was also essential.
Our 2023 mid-point review allowed us to consider our focus areas, outcomes, and definition of young people, amending where necessary to better reflect contributions from young people and the organisations supporting them.
This experience demonstrated the value of regularly testing whether a strategy remains fit-for-purpose and being prepared to make changes when the evidence highlights the need to do so.
The challenges being faced by young people are often intersectional, and they do not operate in silos, meaning that granting into specific issue areas can have its limitations including more programmatic funding as opposed to core operational funding. Going forward, our Backing Young People priority area will more effectively address these intersections, through a focus area-agnostic approach.
In this final year of Backing Young People, we have leaned more intentionally into learning about youth participation and exploring our role in facilitating this in the sector.
We launched our inaugural Youth Participation Program pilot (to be concluded in FY27). Co-designed with and facilitated by YLab, this pilot brings together nine VFFF partners sharing their approaches to youth participation and supporting each other to create an experiment, specific to the context of their organisation, that could further embed this in their work.
This process has renewed our conviction that genuine youth participation must extend beyond consultation.
Young people need to be actively involved in shaping decisions through co-design, governance, and leadership opportunities, with clear outcomes, appropriate support, and fair compensation. Embedding youth participation requires time, expertise and resources, as well as sensitivity to the emotional demands placed on young people. When these conditions are met, youth participation becomes an expression of shared power and a pathway to stronger long-term outcomes.
For us at VFFF, “good” grantmaking looks like being flexible and having an in-depth understanding of each of our partner organisations’ contexts.
Core, multi-year funding can strengthen capacity, governance, and internal systems, while less visible investments, such as fundraising capability, sustainability planning, and CRM upgrades, can provide the foundations for longer-term success. Young leaders can face particular pressures, including isolation and limited capacity, and need support that strengthens not only their capability but also their wellbeing.
Place matters too. In rural and regional communities, trusted local relationships are critical, particularly when programs are being co-designed with young people.
Young people in these communities can experience intersecting challenges that differ from those faced by their metropolitan peers. Our experience showed that relatively modest levels of funding can have significant value when they reach locally connected organisations with a deep understanding of their communities.
Our Founders had a love of the outback, and as we embark on this new strategic period, we are committed to directing 60% of our grants to rural and regional communities.
Finally, we learnt that impact must be understood in deeper ways beyond counting the number of young people engaged with organisations and initiatives.
Quantitative measures are useful, but they cannot capture the full story of change. Qualitative insights illuminate young people’s experiences and the impact of strengthening the organisations around them.
VFFF will head into FY27 with an updated strategy, informed by the learnings above. We will retain a focus on Backing Young People until FY29 – through this priority area, we will provide core and capacity-building support to youth-led, youth-focused, and grassroots rural and regional organisations. Backing Young People will also sit alongside Exploring Christian Faith and Values and Leadership, two priority areas that will be positioned as enduring aspects of our grantmaking.
Grants
2026
Exploration Grant Allocation
$500,000 allocation for the delivery of Explorations Grants aligned across the four pillars under Backing Young People.
VFFF Exploration Grants are one-off grants up to $75,000 to enable aligned organisations to undertake a discrete piece of work that has the potential to significantly contribute to their impact by progressing thinking on an opportunity or challenge they face