Give your local community groups the tools to access more funding outside of Council grants

Strategic Grants is proud to offer New Zealand’s most comprehensive suite of customised grant resources, backed by extensive experience, industry knowledge, and local team members on the ground.

We work with your local Council, to bring you an always up to date list of grant opportunities through access to the GEMS (Grants Expertise Management System) grants calendar database, completely customised for your local organisations. And we couple it with grant readiness training, to increase funding success in your community.

“Auckland Council is very happy with its bulk subscription to GEMS. Best of all, our community groups tell us they are securing more new funding! With GEMS they know which grants are available, and it helps them stay on top of workloads and due dates. They don’t need to spend hours searching for grants, and everything is recorded in one place. Organisations are also learning industry best practice, setting them up for future fundraising success.”
Duncan McLaggan, Auckland Council

“GEM Local, through the Ruapehu District Council GEM Local Community Groups Programme, works really well for us. The customised grants calendar is great for our community groups and has worked really well in being able to provide alternative grant opportunities that they can find all in one place.”
Candice Mcnaught, Ruapehu District Council

Benefits for Councils:

Free up Council time and resources by equipping community groups with tools they need to seek grant funds outside of what your Council offers
Identify relevant grants for Council Projects
Council branded webpage with custom URL – preview what your site could look like here

Benefits for Community Groups:

Self-identify relevant grants for project delivery
Increased grants success and mission delivery
Access to practical webinars, tip sheets and writing samples
Cloud-based software accessible from anywhere and important customised grants information delivered direct to their inbox!

“We absolutely LOVE this access. We have identified many other funders to apply to in the future. The use of this service is amazing.”
GEM Local user via Auckland Council subscription

“GEM Local has been an amazing support as we are working voluntarily, and it saves a lot of time which is important as a volunteer.”
GEM Local user via Whangarei District subscription

“I really love this service and I think it is amazing that Council is supporting charities to access it for free. In the past, we’ve paid a lot of money to access these types of services and got very little value back. For a small charity, that is a huge waste of precious resources. So GEMS is incredibly beneficial to our charity and we really hope this programme can continue. Thank you so much GEMS and Auckland Council!”
GEM Local user via Auckland Council subscription

This is just a snapshot of the outcomes being achieved by community organisations using GEMS as part of the Council programme

Two thirds of community groups found access to GEMs either “Extremely” or “Very” useful.

Four out of five community groups know more about grant opportunities and two out of every three have more advanced notice to prepare applications.

Two thirds of community groups reported reduced time in searching for grants.

One third of community groups have been successful in obtaining new funding streams thanks to the program.

Nine out of every ten community groups have identified at least one new grant opportunity through taking part.

Amongst those who were successful, the median amount of new grant funding is $11,000.

Our Partnership delivers:

A customised grants calendar and GEM Portal account for Council to identify funding prospects for council’s own projects
Training for Council’s Grants Team in using GEM Portal
3 x one-hour live grant writing training webinars for community groups
Free GEM Loca l personalised grants calendars for community groups
Monitoring, evaluation and reporting of the program’s benefits in your local community

Our presence across Aotearoa

In addition to our long-running and successful New Zealand Council programme (we’ve been partnering with Auckland Council and Ruapehu District Council for four years now), we have successfully run our popular face to face Grant-seeker Workshops for smaller local community groups in the Wairarapa, Selwyn and Whangarei funded by councils and community development agencies, as well as our own Best Practice Grant-seeker Workshops in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch for not-for-profits and community groups of all sizes.