Strengthening Family-Centred Collaborations
ThirdStory and Kaarla Baabpa to convene and learn with 17 DFV collaborations across Australia as part of Paul Ramsay Foundation’s Strengthening Family-Centred Collaborations Grant Round
Paul Ramsay Foundation (PRF) has announced support for 17 existing collaborations across the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia, bringing together 58 organisations to improve outcomes for families experiencing domestic and family violence (DFV).
As well as providing much-needed funding, the Strengthening Family-Centred Collaborations grant round aims to influence conditions that hold disadvantage in place in Australia, by convening collaborations and exploring new ways of working with communities, organisations and places. ThirdStory and Aboriginal engagement consultancy Kaarla Baabpa join the Strengthening Family-Centred Collaborations Grant Round as Convenors, to learn from and with grant recipients on behalf of the broader DFV and family support sectors.
About the grant round
The Strengthening Family-Centred Collaborations Grant Round aims to bolster existing place-based collaborations across Australia that are working with children, families and communities to tackle DFV. It takes as its starting point the hypothesis that greater collaboration is needed across services and systems to address this complex and entrenched challenge and provide the long-term, holistic support that children, families and communities need in order to find stability. PRF is providing the 17 collaborations with funding and other support to help grow their collective capacity to assist those affected by DFV with whole-of-family support and long-term stability, with a particular focus on First Nations families, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) families, children under 12, and pregnant women.
The grants will support projects with collective outcomes such as developing an Aboriginal model of care for families experiencing DFV during pregnancy; improving access to safe and coordinated support for CALD and Muslim communities who have experienced or are at risk of experiencing DFV; and support children aged 4-12 to be directly involved in designing child-centred practice tools on DFV.
Each Collaboration in the grant round will receive $600,000 across three years ($200,000 per annum). In addition, the collaborations will work with learning partners to capture collective knowledge to improve outcomes for families. A full list of the collaborating organisations and their chosen focus can be found here.
“While no single service, sector or system can provide the full wraparound support that families need to navigate and recover from the pernicious effects of domestic and family violence, we can achieve a lot more by working together and strengthening our holistic approach.”
Supportive architecture for learning
In keeping with PRF’s aims to both strengthen the impact of collaborations and to learn with and from them, the program will activate and coordinate a range of different learning-focused roles around these initiatives.
ThirdStory and Kaarla Baabpa are the program’s convenors. Over the three year grant period, Kaarla Baabpa will engage and convene First Nations Collaborations, including First Nations only spaces to connect, yarn and self-determine collective learning. ThirdStory will work closely with Kaarla Baabpa and engage and convene non-First Nations-led Collaborations in a range of online and in-person learning and connection experiences.
Together we will design and facilitate culturally safe experiences that connect Collaborations to one another and grow relationships - within and across their area of expertise or focus and their geographic locations. As relationships and trust grows, we will learn about the work of each collaboration, how those they support experience their collaboration in place, what enables them to do their best work, what gaps exist that hold them back, and what principles, approaches, and practices are making a difference for particular cohorts of help-seekers and regions.
We are joined by the program’s evaluators Nous Group, who will set out to understand how the grant round’s design and focus on collaboration might enable stronger outcomes for children, families and communities. The Shape Agency participates as the program’s government relations expert to ensure that findings from the grant program are able to influence government policy and have a lasting impact across Australia.
Through our engagements with Collaborations and with our fellow learning partners Nous and Shape, we aim to surface insights and ideas about how collaborative approaches can offer stronger support to families as they navigate and heal from domestic and family violence.
Building on PRF’s 2023 DFV Special Cohorts Grant Round
ThirdStory (then Innovation Unit Australia New Zealand) were previously a Learning Partner for PRF’s DFV Special Cohorts Grant Round in 2023; convening a network of 31 DFV services who support special cohorts of help-seekers, while First Nations Learning Partner ResearchCrowd convened 27 First Nations-Led organisations.
The insights that emerged from this learning network have contributed to the design of the 2025’s Strengthening Family-Centred Collaborations Grant Round. This approach to grant-giving addresses the DFV field’s need for funding that meets the holistic and complex needs of help-seekers, encourages collaboration and learning across diverse place-based organisations, and breaks down silos that get in the way of help-seekers leaving and healing from violence.
ThirdStory’s insights and recommendations can be found here, and ResearchCrowd’s can be found here.
Project team
Tally Daphu Acting Director (Australia New Zealand)
Emma Scott Senior Project Lead (Australia New Zealand)
Renee Ronan and Natasha Kickett Managing Directors, Kaarla Baabpa