Funding awarded from The Ian Potter Foundation
Biolinks Alliance has received funding from The Ian Potter Foundation to advance community-led ecological restoration over large-landscape scales through central Victoria.
The $495,000 three-year project will grow and specialise the Alliance’s staff team. It will enable the appointment of key roles that will build the organisation’s capacity to support collaboration and the uptake of coordinated and innovative approaches to landscape repair.
The Ian Potter Foundation have set the challenge for the Alliance to up-scale its operations to deliver new approaches to nature conservation that are able to meet the species extinction and climate change crises of the 21st Century.
Despite the heroic efforts of many, we are still going backwards with 495 plant and 198 animal species threatened with extinction in central Victoria. Deeper collaboration and community involvement are key to restoring and reconnecting threatened habitats across privately held land and reconnecting our larger conservation parks and reserves.
The funding is recognition that it is critical to fund new specialist collaborative organisations that operate at the coal face to bridge the efforts of private land managers with other key stakeholders, including larger environmental not-for-profits, government, business, the research community, philanthropists and the wider-community.
The funding will enable the Alliance to capitalise on the significant investment it has made over the past 10 years, with the support of volunteers, private donors and philanthropists, in building a strong community network. The genuine community consultation, shared-learning and partnership building the Alliance has undertaken has resulted in many innovative landscape restoration project opportunities for threatened flagship species and their habitats, including Gliders and Woodland Birds.
The Alliance is seeking to leverage the funding to ensure the most possible impact is gained from this significant opportunity. We invite others to come on board and help us demonstrate a new inclusive approach to landscape conservation, that can be up-scaled through central Victoria and adopted more widely elsewhere.
“The solutions are out there to be found, however they require urgent leadership, a culture of shared stewardship and working together in ways we haven’t before. The Alliance is honoured to receive the funding and is extremely appreciative The Ian Potter Foundation’s generous and strategic philanthropy”
Louise Arkles from The Ian Potter Foundation joins us for lunch in the Box Ironbark forest, as part of the Spring Plains Watershed Repair group site visit.
The Ian Potter Foundation is one of Australia’s major philanthropic foundations. The Foundation makes grants nationally to support charitable organisations working to benefit the community across a wide range of sectors including the arts, medical research, public health research, early childhood development, community wellbeing and environmental science. The Ian Potter Foundation aims to support and promote a fair, healthy, sustainable and vibrant Australia.