Grantmaking Muster: Melbourne Edition is Here!
Melbourne Grantmakers – You’re Invited to Our Next Grantmaking Muster
When: Thursday 23 October 2025, Registration opens 1:15PM.
Event starts 1:30PM (Sharp)– 4:30PM, Stick around for casual drinks, snacks and conversation with fellow Grantmakers until 6:00pm.
Where: Veriu QV, Franklin Room -101 Therry Street, Melbourne, VIC
What's included: Afternoon sessions, interactive activities, and end-of-day drinks with light bites.
This is a FREE event.
Don’t miss this chance to connect, learn and sharpen your grantmaking practice.
Register now for an afternoon packed with practical insights, real world examples, and conversations that matter.
Join us in Melbourne for an in person session where we’ll dive deep into what’s working (and what’s not) in outcomes focused, equitable, and low risk grantmaking. You’ll leave with actionable tools, fresh perspectives, and stronger connections with your peers.
On the agenda:
- Impact & Evaluation – Set realistic expectations and build feedback loops that actually help
- Analytics in Grantmaking – Use your data to drive better decisions and surface equity gaps
- Assessment Panels & Risk – Design fairer panels and manage risk without freezing up
- Process Mapping – Uncover pain points and visualise your grant process end to end
- Lightning Challenge Carousel – Rotate through key grantmaking themes in a fast, interactive group activity
- Networking Drinks – Unwind, share stories, and build your local network
Spaces are limited – register now to secure your place!
Ready to connect? Your grantmaking community is waiting at the Muster!
Next Muster will be in Brisbane early 2026...
FAQs
The dictionary defines muster as an assembled group or collection. At SmartyGrants it’s a gathering of grantmakers, a cohort of local, state or federal grantmakers who all use SmartyGrants to share wins, challenges, processes and forms (if you like), with the bonus of some SmartyGrants staff in the room. We will help guide the conversation, facilitate the discussion, and pour the drinks. We create the space where you can share with your colleagues and establish and develop a community of best practice. We will also provide some expertise, system demos and information about what's coming down the pipe in SmartyGrants functionality.
We will have SmartyGrants folks in the room, to help answer your pressing questions. But these musters are more about you and less about us. The muster will be full of local grantmakers – your peers.
Musters generally start with a presentation. We might spark the conversation with questions and facilitate the discussion, but ultimately a muster is an opportunity for you to share and build your own local grantmaking community.
“None of us is as smart as all of us,” says Denis Moriarty, the founder of SmartyGrants' parent company, Our Community.
Yes, networking is important, and so is finding out more about SmartyGrants – both are good reasons to go. But the main draw of a SmartyGrants muster is that it's an event where you can speak to Anh from the next council over about how she set up a community assessment panel, or Simon from the Department of Transport about managing an acquittal process, or Abbey, Marissa and Anthony about maybe collaborating on a program across three councils …
The reason you should go is to arm yourself with tools and connections that will help you to serve your community.
A better question to ask is: why shouldn’t I go?
Musters are not an online opportunity. This is about being in the room with your peers. We will come to you.
Musters can be hosted in most capital cities in Australia, depending on interest. We think around 30 grantmakers make a muster, so gather your colleagues and work groups and get in touch, or register below if we are in your city.
Musters are for you. If you have a speaker you would like to hear from or a topic you would like to hear about at your local muster, let us know. Better still, do you have a topic to present? Get in touch!
Contact us at service@smartygrants.com.au, and make sure you add "Muster" to your subject line for easy identification.