2024-2025 Community Program Funding – Community Project Grants (Round One) – Program/projects

The purpose of this report is for Council to consider and approve the first round of the 2023-24 community project grants for programming projects, providing an attachment to this report. A total value of $42,085. Noosa Council's grants program assists in delivering council's strategic goals and objectives. The funding is intended to help community organisation meet community needs, build community skills and resilience, support community connection, and develop and maintain community infrastructure. The grants program is. Administered through an equitable and transparent process whereby funds are awarded to projects which best meet the relevant criteria and represent the value of the ratepayers' money.

Jessica Phillips237:28

So the purpose of this report is to consider and approve the first round of the 24/25 community project grants for infrastructure as provided in attachment 1 of this report the total grant value of $30,000 infrastructure, building or work infrastructure improvement projects include new or replacement infrastructural maintenance of existing infrastructure this may include but is not limited to energy for shabining, shade sales, storage facilities, new or upgraded amenities, water harvesting to solar systems.

We've got two streams of funding which you can see in the same report. They both come under the environment climate change resilience grants. We've got the environment grants which are assessed against the environment grants policy which is based on implementing council's key environment strategies plans and the actions within them that are appropriately delivered through grants with increased capacity of local groups through a collaborative to approach to environmental management and increased funding directed to environmental activities through opportunities of community groups organisations to leverage extra funding and then we've got a range of criteria used to delve into each of those their change grants assessed differently they're assessed on impacts to mitigate climate change or be able to build resilience to climate change and so we assess them differently we've got two different panels that assess each of the grants of the grants this we only have one round of grants for our environment and climate change resilience grants so we receive six applications two for environment four for climate change the two for environment were under subscribed and our funds were twenty four thousand three hundred eighty two which is funded from the Environment Levy we received grant applications totalling thirteen thousand two hundred and ninety three dollars these are project grants and so we've got left over from our grants budget, from our Environment Levy we had eleven thousand and eighty nine dollars with our climate change grants we they're funded through general rates and there was a fifty thousand dollar budget allocation we received grants for the eighty title of nine thousand eight hundred and six so we're around thirty nine thousand dollars oversubscribed and so when we've made our assessments against the climate change resilience grants we're through recommendations able to manage the amount to fifty thousand dollars which is why I've made some criteria and provided some commentary around what's getting funded and what's not getting funded so there are two grants for environment that are provided in the attachment. There's one for Wildlife Noosa for line and net reduction program which is an extension of this existing program which is great because it gets volunteers out on the river or we'll say it leverages huge amounts of volunteer in-kind contributions to be able to do a job which if we were going to resource it, was council's responsibility to resource it, would cost tens of thousands of dollars so a small amount of project grants received a huge amount of benefit for our entangled wildlife. The second one was Noosa land care, sorry I will say that first grant was for a total of $4,755. The second one our environment. Was Noosa land care which is looking to celebrate and educate landholders in the hinterland for environmental practices and so it's a publication that we used for a considerable amount of time. There was like 8,500 of these and there was 50 cents in the recommendation. For the environment grants was to fully fund both things. We undersubscribed both of them. The assessment panels felt that they met the threshold criteria for fully funding. So that's matched up all against the criteria. Well, I've got the floor. Our climate change grants provided a little bit more challenge because we were oversubscribing there. Look, I'll say all the grant applications were really good. And were the projects, some aligned really well with the assessment criteria and others while good ideas might be delayed a little bit so we've recommended Zero Emissions Noosa for 2020. $29,000 for a energy assessments and upgrades on low income and vulnerable households. Fully funded that program. It met all of the criteria that we were using for climate change resilience grants plus, and it wasn't assessed, but it's just got a great so sitting as well. We didn't consider that when we were making the grant application, but it's definitely an added bonus for that one. There were two grant applications, oh sorry, the second grant application that we were fully funding was the Tewantin Noosa Lions Club for additional solar panels on their Lions Club den and putting on solar panels does align really well with climate change gains because part of the criteria is around reducing carbon footprint. There was another grant application from Noosa Landcare which was looking at a geomorphology study for upper pinbaran creek to be able to better plan for natural methods to reduce silication and landslip. The connection through to climate change is based on increased weather events and management and land use actions that have been undertaken in the last hundred years exacerbating a lot of problems for silication and landslip and doing a study on the underlying geomorphology particularly on upper catchment streams and really gives a good indication as to how you or how a stabilisation project would be determined because quite often it's not the overlying soil it's the underlying geology that will determine what's the best application. We on assessment because there was some great climate adaptation um there wasn't any demonstration for carbon offsets see what um sitting within which is why one down and we've nominated a partial funding for that one. There was one project that we uh recommend or that officers have recommended not to fund and that was Sunshine Coast environment Council for marine pollution in brackets polystyrene response coordination and education project. This is a really good idea. Council is planning on running something similar to this year which would be the first step and so we didn't want to have Council resources doubling up with an environment grant. Whose idea will be more relevant next year and we've done the pace foundation work for this year so for SCEC it was assessed as a great grant because of the double up that we've got with the Council program which we've been planning for 18 this point in time we've chosen to not recommend funding that but we encourage SCEC to put in an application because it will be very relevant for next year when we've done our waste symposium.

Jessica Phillips251:06

The purpose of this report is to provide, sorry, the four reports have been presented to Council for this round for community grants funding that provide further details for each grant. A breakdown of those are the events category, so $23,200. Equipment, $36,647.18. Infrastructure $30 of,000. Project for or program. $42,085. The total amount recommended is $131,932.18. To break down that we received 19 grant 19 applications in that Round 1 and 14 of them are recommended. The 2024-25 overall proposed budget is $324,780.80 and recommended in this round for funding is $131,932.18.