Fay Fuller Foundation: Co-designing structures for community-led decision-making

Fay Fuller Foundation is a private philanthropic organisation in South Australia, founded in 2003 by Margaret ‘Fay’ Fuller. The foundation’s purpose, to “resource community determined responses to complex challenges”, is underpinned by principles of being community-centred and enabling communities to be self-determining; building trust-based partnerships that go beyond financial resourcing; and seeking to influence the wider determinants and inter-connected systems that impact the focus areas in which the foundation seeks to achieve impact. Through its First Nations Health Funding initiative, Fay Fuller Foundation has moved into a space of overt power-sharing, enabling Indigenous self-determination through models of decision-making and priority setting that are actively designed by and for Aboriginal communities. Read the Fay Fuller Foundation story below.

In the video below, Trustee, Carolyn Curtis, describes the journey that Fay Fuller Foundation’s board went on towards community-led decision-making, which was a process of trustees letting go of ego and questioning who the holds power to decide.

NB: This is a case study from The Philanthropic Landscape Volume II: Shifting Culture and Power through Mana-Enhancing Partnerships. Read the full report here.