Findex Launches New Community Fund

A new community fund has been launched to create equal access to opportunity for people isolated by location or circumstances.

The Findex Community Fund (FCF) will partner with charities across Australia and New Zealand to support programs focusing on health, education and entrepreneurship, as well as providing support through community donating, and matched gifting.

Findex and its subsidiaries have committed to a multi-year, multi-million dollar program.

Findex chief financial officer, and FCF director Matt Games told Pro Bono News it was a great day for the Findex team and an opportunity “to showcase the dedicated work of the company to support and improve the lives of those around us”.

“Today is something I personally have been looking forward to for a long time,” Games said.

“There has been a lot of work going on behind the scenes to get it to this point. There are a fair few moving parts in it, it is great to get it to launch.”

He said Findex was in a great position to help people who were isolated, and there were not many other professional services firms that could do that.

“So in our space, which is accounting and financial services, the industry is dominated by big names in the capital cities so your EY and PwC and Deloitte, and then in the suburbs and the regional areas it tends to be the one man band,” Games said.

“There’s not really a lot, in the professional services space, of businesses in regional Australia with any particular amount of scale. So we see that as a bit of a differentiator, that’s where we can do something a little bit different, and we can utilise our 3,000 staff, 250,000 clients to help in those more regional communities.

“We’ve got offices and partners and people in a lot of regional communities and they do so much for us, they are the clients that produce revenue for us, we obviously help them by providing services but it will be so much nicer… to actually be giving back a little bit more to those communities and being sort of a member of them as well.”

As part of the official launch, FCF announced partnerships with three charitable organisations across Australia.

Yalari​ is a not for profit offering secondary education scholarships at leading Australian boarding schools for Indigenous children from regional, rural and remote communities.

Beacon Foundation ​helps young Australians successfully transition into meaningful employment, working to end youth unemployment across the country.

And Royal Far West​ is a 94-year old not for profit improving the lives of children and young people who live in rural and remote areas.

Yalari founder Waverley Stanley said they were honoured that Findex had chosen to support Yalari and Indigenous education.

“Contributions from the fund will help create opportunities for Indigenous children to receive a quality education; to dream big, achieve and make a positive difference in their communities,”  Stanley said.

“Thank you to the team at Findex for sharing in the vision of empowering Indigenous young people with unlimited possibilities.”

In New Zealand, FCF has partnered with Kids Can, Ronald McDonald House Charities, and Outward Bound.

Games said when choosing their charity partners, the ability to provide tangible benefits and outcomes for every dollar put in was a big driver.

“One big thing that we were looking for is we want to make sure as much of the money we raise actually flows through to the end recipient as possible, so what we were looking for was charities where there was a tangible outcome. For example in the education space we’ve been able to partner and provide specific grants so that a person can undertake some study, so we know if we put $2,000 in, there is a $2,000 scholarship at the end,” he said.

The fund will be announcing further partnerships with organisations across Australia over the next few months.

But Games said they would be retaining a small number of main charity partner, in order to “get the most benefit out there”.

“I think if you try to be everything to everyone you end up just giving small allocations to a broad number so, with the main partner base it may change and it may expand, but it is not one that is going to go from three charities to 300, it will remain a smallish number,” he said.

“Another thing that we’re launching as part of the community fund is the staff matched giving program, so where we will be able to get a little bit more diversity is through that. So staff have the ability to nominate a charity within those three areas that they want to support, they’re able to nice and easily set up a monthly payroll deduction to support the charity and we as the fund with match that donation up to a set amount, so that’s where we think we will get the variety.

“We’re trying to go for the big bang most impact through a small number of big partners and then we let the staff drive where the wider allocation goes beyond that.”