Partner profile: Paul Ramsay Foundation  

The Paul Ramsay Foundation’s partnership with Our Place plays a critical role in improving families’ access to education, health and community support resources.

As one of Australia’s largest charitable foundations, Paul Ramsay Foundation (PRF) is supporting Our Place as the ‘backbone’ funding partner. The $13.5 million in funding over six years has enabled the scaling up of Our Place to be implemented in ten locations across Victoria.

This critical partnership provides significant support to Our Place’s ’backbone’ organisation to ensure consistency of the Our Place approach across sites, provides for the research and evaluation function, communications and advocacy activity, and to develop the overall capability of the team.

Healthcare pioneer Paul Ramsay AO established the Foundation in 2006 and, after his death in 2014, left most of his estate to continue his philanthropy for generations to come. PRF believes in a world where all people live their best lives. Its purpose is to help end cycles of disadvantage in Australia by enabling equitable opportunity for people and communities to thrive.

PRF’s Acting Head of Early Childhood Jackie Ruddock said that the Our Place model makes a lot of sense.

“Our Place centres and strengthens schools as community hubs, ensuring families have access to social supports, and help to navigate complex systems.”

The scaling of Our Place to ten sites across Victoria creates a pathway to sustainability by the government adopting the approach into the education system.

“The aim is to generate evidence of the approach to demonstrate its impact to government for adoption of the model more broadly. We recognise it can be difficult to find funding for the facilitation role that acts as glue to enable place-based initiatives to work. These are the people who connect everyone together and facilitate the holistic approach,”

Jackie Ruddock

Philanthropy plays an important role by strategically funding this “invisible work,” particularly when other parties may not be ready to take the risk.

“Investing in new initiatives is important work. We support initiatives that are still building their evidence-base and therefore struggle to draw from very specific government funding streams or strategies,” Ms Ruddock said.

To learn more about the important work of the Paul Ramsay Foundation visit www.paulramsayfoundation.org.au