What better way to spend a Wednesday evening than at the Thornbury Bowls Club, surrounded by extraordinary people with a sausage sizzle underway. Last week, the Victorian Women’s Trust brought together our 2026/27 grantees, donors, Trustees and staff for our first ever Grants Meet N’ Greet. It was also the perfect time to announce our newest Sub-Fund, established by Shane O’Neil.

As the (very) new Grants and Community Impact Manager at the Trust, I went into the event excited to finally put faces to the names I had been encountering in grant applications, emails and spreadsheets. What I hadn’t quite anticipated was how quickly the room would begin making connections of its own. 

Image: (from left) Nicky Friedman (VWT Chair), Richa George (VWT, Grants and Community Impact Manager) and Chris Friday (Christine Friday and Kathleen Pooley Sub-Fund). Photo by Ava Wansbrough.

People knew each other’s organisations. They knew each other’s work. They discovered mutual colleagues, shared communities and overlapping causes. Conversations that started with “Oh, you’re from…” quickly became exchanges about programs, people, and possibilities. 

Of course they did.

Grassroots feminist work rarely happens in isolation. Campaigns, community organisations and movements grow through relationships: people sharing knowledge, opening doors, introducing someone to someone else, lending credibility, offering practical support and sometimes simply saying, you should apply for this.

And then came another kind of connection. I spent a fair chunk of the evening connecting grantees with the donors who had supported their work, wanting to meet them properly. Thank them in person. It was such a simple thing, but it felt significant. Funding and applications can so easily live on paper. But here were the people on either side of the process actually meeting one another — donors getting to hear what their generosity had made possible, and grantees getting to meet the people who had chosen to back their ideas. 

That’s something we want to build on at the Trust: more opportunities for grantees and donors to meet one another, hear from one another, and understand the work beyond an application, an acquittal report, or a name attached to a Sub-Fund. Over time, we want our grants program to feel like a connected community. And if the Grants Meet N’Greet showed us anything, it’s that much of that community already exists. We heard this clearly from three of our grantees who came along and gave a short talk about their work.

Last year, the Trust funded Bakhtar Community Organisation to deliver a gender-based family violence prevention program. As Haroon Sayed (Head of Operations and Projects) told us, “Thanks to the Victorian Women’s Trust supporting our project and providing us funding, our workshops are still continuing — in fact, they’re running strongly.”

But there was another part of this story I loved — Bakhtar was supported in their work by the Multicultural Women’s Alliance Against Family Violence. This year, Bakhtar returned the favour by auspicing and supporting the Alliance to secure funding for its own project. This feels like grassroots organising at its best. Support creates capacity; capacity creates new opportunities; and organisations turn around and hold the door open for each other. 

Dr Veena Barsiwal, Co-Chair of the Multicultural Women’s Alliance Against Family Violence, spoke about their newly funded project, Towards a Community-Centred Family Violence System in Victoria: Lessons from Grassroots Multicultural Models. 

Image: Dr Veena Barsiwal, Co-Chair of the Multicultural Women’s Alliance Against Family Violence. Photo by Ava Wansbrough.

The project will document approaches already being developed within multicultural communities and grassroots organisations, drawing attention to lived experience and practical solutions that can help make family violence systems more culturally responsive. It also seeks to create space for “collaborative problem-solving and reflection on system improvements” and facilitate networks where “everybody can get to know each other, how to work together, and how to work better”.

It was a rather perfect example of the kind of knowledge that already exists within communities,  and what becomes possible when that knowledge is properly supported, documented, and shared. 

Our final grantee speakers, Aleyna Ozsoy and Tash from Banksia Gardens Community Services, told us about the Girl’s Circle Program, which creates a space for young girls, particularly those from Middle Eastern backgrounds, “to talk authentically about issues such as mental health, body image, sexuality, gender identity, the sort of thing that’s a bit taboo in other places.”

As Aleyna put it, it gives girls a third space: where they can feel safe, included and able to be themselves. “And it can be a little bit naughty sometimes,” she added, “but that’s just natural.” Frankly, a feminist youth program with room for a little bit of naughtiness sounds about right to me. 

Our Chair, Nicky Friedman — a self-described “fixture” at the Trust after 20 years on the Board — also reminded us why supporting this work matters, particularly at times when the world can feel decidedly bleak. On the dark days, she said, we can look towards “the seeds of change that are being sown by the work that is done by organisations like all of the ones that you represent here today.”And there were plenty of seeds in that room. 

We also had the privilege of marking the launch of the Shane O’Neil Sub-Fund, our newest named Sub-Fund, established to continue Shane’s commitment to expanding opportunity, leadership and connection for young women, girls, and gender diverse people. 

Sub-Fund launches at the Trust quite rightly tend to come with their own celebration. Sadly, Shane was not able to be with us on the night. Yet, there is something fitting about her fund entering the world quietly, folded into an evening celebrating the work of others. From everything we have learned about Shane, she has spent a lifetime doing exactly that: working behind the scenes, noticing potential, creating opportunities and quietly helping change happen. 

Ordinary women. Extraordinary lives. And now, a Sub-Fund dedicated to backing the next generation to speak up, step in, and lead. That feels pretty radical right now.

The Shane O’Neil Sub-Fund will be accepting grant applications in April, 2027. To find out more, visit our grants hub →
Learn more about our grants program, going strong since 1985 →

Richa George, Grants and Community Impact Manager

Richa George is a sociologist, researcher and incurably curious person. More often than not, you’ll find her deep in a Wikipedia rabbit hole about anything from the morbid to the mundane. Her career has spanned engineering, operations, international development and academia, and she’s picked up an oddly useful collection of skills and experiences along the way.