Early childhood – Eureka Benevolent Foundation

Early childhood grant round

One of the Eureka Benevolent Foundation’s focus areas is early childhood where we invest to provide solid foundations for children to learn, flourish and prosper across their lives. The early childhood grant round aims to help children achieve their potential in the early years and set them up for long-term success at school and beyond.

We know that children from families experiencing disadvantage are less likely to attend early learning services and are at greater risk of developmental vulnerability. To support these children and their families, we are looking to partner with an ambitious not for profit organisation and their partners who believe their work can catalyse transformational change for children aged 0-5 experiencing educational disadvantage.

Grant funding

We will award one grant of up to $500,000 per year for three to five years. A total grant pool of $2.5 million is available over the five-year period.

How to apply

Applications closed in October 2024.

Early childhood grant guidelines

Download our early childhood grant guidelines to learn more about the opportunity, timelines, selection criteria and read our FAQs.

Eligibility

Grant applicants must be organisations registered as a Tax Concession Charity and registered under Schedule 1 as a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR1) in Australia to be eligible to apply. The proposed project must be operating from and delivered in Australia.

Meet our partners

We are proud to have partnered with many organisations over the years to improve educational outcomes in Australia. Read on to get a sense of the projects we have recently invested in:

Eureka Benevolent Foundation is proud to partner with the Getting it Right from the Start research project by the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. With an aim to help children ‘keep up’ so they don’t have to ‘catch up’, teachers provide evidence-based targeted support to children’s learning needs.

We have a long-standing partnership with the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation. In 2023, they released the Overcoming Disadvantage in Early Childhood Study with the Australian Council for Educational Research. It is an evaluation of their early language and literacy program that demonstrates their valuable work has closed the oral language and early literacy learning gap for children in marginalised communities in the year before school.

EBF is proud to partner with Y NSW to trial the Alternative Suspension program in Australia. Highly successful in Canada, the program aims to address educational disengagement, the underlying causes of disengagement, and establish ongoing support pathways and successful returns to school for students currently on, or at risk of, school suspension. A rigorous independent evaluation of the program will run in parallel with a view to better understand its impact and potential for systemic change in school exclusion policy and processes nationally.