Each year Highways and Byways – Healing the Land, Healing Ourselves, Together provides small grants to community organisations for projects that address disadvantage and exclusion within towns and communities, especially in rural and regional Australia.
This year, our program theme is ‘Healing and Growing Together’ in recognition of the environmental and social challenges that rural and regional communities have endured over the last few years. Drought, bushfires and floods have ravaged parts of the country and the Covid19 pandemic saw long periods of isolation and restrictions on movement, education and trade.
We were therefore keen to support projects that encourage environmental and ecological restoration and rehabilitation, and projects that bring communities back together. We wanted to support opportunities for people to collaborate and form new partnerships, where they could develop new skills and obtain new knowledge that would allow them to manage their land and environs sustainably into the future. We wanted to encourage and support the emergence of new leaders. We also wanted to foster Indigenous identity and cultural connections, through collaboration and connection, between people and with Country.
Congratulations to the twenty projects that will receive small grants from Highways and Byways this year. These projects stretch the depth and breadth of the nation and represent a diverse range of activity that will not only care for land, waters and Country, but also for the people who inhabit them.
You can view the complete list of grants by clicking here: 2023 Small Grants Summary.
We look forward to sharing the outcomes of these initiatives with you as they are implemented across the year.
Our grants would not be possible without the support of our donors – and we thank them for their continued generosity.
Details of our 2024 Small Grants Program will be available in late 2023.
IMAGE c/- Members of the Country Women’s Association in Tasmania Online Branch undertook a planting day to grow produce for local food banks (2022 small grant recipient).