Corporate partnership

Consumer debt during serious illness is one of the last frontiers of financial hardship in Australia where there is no institutional safety net. Your business can help build one.

What Life Without Debt does

Life Without Debt is a proposed Australian public benevolent institution that resolves consumer debt — credit cards, personal loans, buy-now-pay-later balances, telco and utility arrears, informal small-lender debt — for people living with terminal, life-limiting, chronic or serious illness. Casework is delivered by trained staff and volunteers under formal supervision. Service is free at the point of use.

Why corporate partners work with us

• Direct relevance for financial services and health-sector firms. The intersection of serious illness and consumer debt sits inside the actual customer books of banks, credit-card issuers, BNPL providers, telcos, energy retailers, and private-health insurers. Partnership with LWD is a route to demonstrably better hardship outcomes and to reducing your own operational cost of collections against terminally ill customers.
• Employee engagement. Payroll giving, matched giving, skills-based volunteering (finance, legal, technology, communications), and staff-led fundraising all have natural fit.
• Governance and reporting standards you can rely on. LWD will operate under ACNC Governance Standards, publish audited financial statements on registration in first year of operation, and report against a documented impact methodology.

Partnership models

• Sustaining partner — multi-year unrestricted funding, in return for shared reporting and a considered co-branding position.
• Programme partner — funding tied to a specific programme (e.g. a particular condition category, a particular state, a particular casework capability).
• Corporate matched giving — matching your employees' personal giving to LWD.
• Payroll giving — enabling pre-tax donations from your Australian payroll (workplace giving is one of the most efficient forms of individual giving; look for the Workplace Giving Australia framework).
• Pro bono or skills-based partnership — providing time in place of dollars: legal review of case files, technology support, communications counsel, financial-planning training for our team.
• Cause-related marketing — a portion of the sale of a product or service is donated to LWD. Governed by the ACCC guidance on charitable-cause marketing and by our Fundraising Conduct policy.

What we ask of corporate partners

1. That the partnership be consistent with our beneficiary class and our Beneficiary Depiction Guardrails. We will not accept partnerships that require us to name individual beneficiaries in marketing without their fully informed and revocable consent.
2. That the funding not compromise our independence. All casework decisions are made by LWD staff under LWD's clinical, financial, and legal supervision, not by partners.
3. That any co-branding, cause-related marketing, or employee-facing communications be approved by both parties in writing before publication.

Sector exclusions

Under our Ethical Fundraising position (Sprint 37), certain sector partnerships will not be accepted — including for-profit high-cost credit providers, payday lenders (as defined by APRA/ASIC), fringe debt-collection agencies, and certain gambling operators. The full exclusions list will be published on registration.

Speak with us

To begin a conversation about corporate partnership, please write to partnerships@cosailifewithoutdebt.org. Our Board is small at present; the initial conversation will be led personally by the co-founder or a nominated director.

Privacy & complaints

Partnership correspondence and any commercial-in-confidence material are protected under our Privacy Policy. Concerns can be raised via /complaints.

Version 0.1 · HA1 draft · Sprint 36. Related: Major donor case for support · Grants pipeline · Impact reporting · Board & Governance.