For grantmakers

This page is a summary version of the material grant assessors will find useful in a first-round review. A full pack (theory of change diagram, three-year budget, board CVs, draft evaluation framework) is available on request.

Charity legal status

• Legal form: company limited by guarantee (proposed Australian company). ACN: pending · ABN: pending.
• Proposed subtype: Public Benevolent Institution (PBI) under the ACNC Act 2012 · ACNC registration: pending.
• Tax concession status: ACNC-endorsed DGR under Item 4 of s.30-45 of the ITAA 1997 (PBI): pending.
• Governing document: constitution (available on request; extract at /board-and-governance).

Purpose (constitution clause 4)

To relieve poverty, misfortune, distress or helplessness among persons in Australia living with terminal, life-limiting, chronic or serious illness — and their immediate families and primary carers — by resolving consumer debt on their behalf and providing associated financial-hardship advocacy.

Theory of change (summary)

If a person living with terminal, life-limiting, chronic or serious illness in Australia can access competent, free-at-the-point-of-use, in-illness consumer-debt advocacy — then the consumer-debt component of their financial distress is resolved on a documented timeline — which reduces the total distress load carried by that person and their family during the illness — which improves the person's ability to focus on treatment, on the people they love, and on end-of-life planning where relevant — and reduces preventable financial harm to the household after death.

The mechanism is casework — one-to-one advocacy — not general information provision. The comparator is the current default: no dedicated service exists.

Outputs and outcomes we will track

• Output 1 · Beneficiaries served. Count of unique persons for whom LWD delivered at least one full casework cycle in the period.
• Output 2 · Debts resolved. Count and total dollar value of consumer debts resolved (waived, written down, restructured, or paid out through hardship provisions), disaggregated by creditor type.
• Output 3 · Casework hours delivered. Total supervised casework hours, disaggregated by staff versus supervised volunteer.
• Outcome 1 · Beneficiary self-reported distress reduction. Pre/post casework brief measure, opt-in, anonymised.
• Outcome 2 · Referrer-reported case-conference impact. Structured feedback from GPs, palliative-care nurses, oncology social workers on whether LWD engagement changed the clinical or social conversation for their patient.
• Outcome 3 · Post-bereavement estate impact. For a consented subset, quantum of consumer debt that did not fall on the estate or on surviving family as a result of casework — to be measured with independent methodological review before publication.

Budget architecture (summary)

• Year 1 target — sub-$500,000 total operating cost. Casework-hours model rather than staff-headcount model. Roles funded: 1 executive lead, 2 casework leads (part-time), volunteer supervision, technology, legal, insurance, audit.
• Year 2 — scaling to national coverage on a supervised-volunteer model with regional casework leads.
• Year 3 — settled operating base with published unit costs.
• Reserves policy — three months' operating reserve minimum, in line with sector norms.
• Full three-year budget — available on request under grant-assessor NDA where required.

Grant type fit

• Seed / start-up funding — natural fit. Year 1 is a genuine start-up year.
• Capacity-building / infrastructure — good fit for technology, governance, and workforce development lines.
• Programme funding — good fit where a foundation has a specific interest (e.g. a condition category, a state, a demographic).
• Systems-change funding — reasonable fit; the model is designed to change what "hardship" looks like in the intersection of illness and consumer debt in Australia.

What we ask of grantmakers

1. Do not require us to name individual beneficiaries in reporting unless the beneficiary has given fully informed, revocable consent. Beneficiary Depiction Guardrails (Kit-04) apply.
2. Allow reasonable overhead allocation. Casework is human work; the true cost of delivering it well includes supervision, training, insurance, and back-office.
3. Report acceptance of the grant publicly so that we can acknowledge it in our impact report and on our website with your name.

Speak with us

To discuss a grant, please write to grants@cosailifewithoutdebt.org with a brief indication of your foundation's focus areas and typical grant size. We will respond within ten business days.

Privacy & complaints

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