This is a working draft of an investment framework, based on the first phase of the Civility Coalition's work. It will inform the Collective Action Workshops that the Menzies Leadership Foundation (MLF) and the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute (SFRI) are arranging following the Australian Social Cohesion Summit 2026 in November. See What happens next for details. Nothing in this document commits any Coalition member to anything.
The case for investing in social cohesion
Trust in the federal government sits at 37 per cent on the Scanlon Institute's 2025 survey, down from 53 per cent two decades ago, and the Royal Commission established after the Bondi Beach attack has strengthening social cohesion in its remit. The response so far has leaned on security and services. As ASIO's director-general put it, "you cannot arrest your way to social cohesion." What builds cohesion is slower and more local: the conditions that let people live well across difference. Those conditions are things a funder can invest in.
Lenses on civility and social cohesion
There are many ways to define civility and social cohesion. Two the Coalition has worked with:
Listening respectfully, speaking honestly, and staying engaged across our differences, especially when it's hard.
— Menzies Leadership Foundation
A condition in which people, groups and institutions with heterogeneous identities, views, and preferences are connected through durable, inclusive, high-quality relationships that enable collaboration towards collective goals across the whole of society.
— Australian Resilient Democracy Network, Discussion Paper 18
Prompted by definitions like these and by their own work, Coalition members identified four distinct lenses on social cohesion, each with implications for the type of work we might do together:
Civility as an outcome. A destination to aim for: a more civil Australia. This lens points towards measuring progress and defining what "getting there" looks like.
Civility as a process. A day-to-day practice that can be developed and improved. This lens suggests interventions that build habits, skills and routines.
Civility as a disposition. An attitude towards difference, held by individuals or communities. This lens suggests ways of embodying a particular stance towards conflict.
Civility as an infrastructure. A systemic asset: the web of systems, organisations, policies, people and connections that scaffold a civil society. This lens takes an asset-based view, where civility is the result of many things working together.
These lenses help identify the different approaches through which social cohesion can be funded, and what all of those approaches share and need.
Where a dollar lands
The Coalition's conditions framework, below, shows a funder how any individual project or investment connects to others. It gives a system view that helps very different organisations see their work, and each other's, in one frame, across many places and settings.
Four conditions (capacity, capability, trust and belonging) sit against four levels (personal, interpersonal, community and systemic):
Select any cell to see what it holds.
Start anywhere
Each cell is somewhere civility is built or lost. Select one to see what it means, and the kind of work that lives there.
Read all sixteen cells as a list
What each cell holds, from the Coalition's first-phase interviews and sessions:
Capacity. The time, resources and headroom to take part.
- Personal: time, energy & headspace. People who are exhausted or stretched thin can't take on civic life. Capacity starts at the kitchen table.
- Interpersonal: relational investment. Space in daily life for real conversations: at school gates, workplaces and clubs, not just in formal forums.
- Community: connective infrastructure. Organisations, venues and volunteers with room to convene as well as deliver services. This is where capacity strain shows first.
- Systemic: structural enablers. Funding and policy settings that resource connection itself, not only programmes and outputs.
Capability. The skills and confidence to engage well across difference.
- Personal: skills for dialogue. The skills to listen, disagree well and stay in hard conversations, even when it costs something.
- Interpersonal: brave conversations. Practices for bridging difference: facilitation, mediation, everyday diplomacy between neighbours and colleagues.
- Community: facilitated processes. Local leadership that can hold tension, broker between groups and keep people at the table.
- Systemic: institutional practice. A workforce and field that knows how to do this work, and shared pathways to learn it.
Trust. The confidence that people and institutions will act in good faith.
- Personal: openness to others. Confidence that speaking up is safe, and worth it.
- Interpersonal: relational trust. Relationships strong enough to survive disagreement: the difference between a debate and a rupture.
- Community: civic trust. Faith in local institutions (councils, media, schools, clubs) to act fairly and in good faith.
- Systemic: institutional legitimacy. Confidence in national institutions and processes (parliament, the public service, the media) to act in good faith.
Belonging. The sense that you're part of the place and the conversation.
- Personal: sense of place. Feeling seen and valued for who you are, without needing to shrink to fit.
- Interpersonal: recognition & inclusion. Being welcome across the everyday settings of a life: the street, the school, the sporting club.
- Community: shared identity. A shared local identity and story that has room for everyone in a place.
- Systemic: national narrative. A national story people can see themselves in, whatever their background.
Every cell of this matrix already has organisations working in it. For a funder, the framework is a way to see what kind of thing you're funding, what level it works at, and whose existing work it lands beside.
Funding for system change
Funding for work on any condition, at any level, lands better if it's joined up. A local programme that knows the national frameworks around it goes further than one working alone, and the same applies in reverse.
Australia has no shortage of research, pilots, advocates and practitioners working to strengthen social cohesion. What remains scarce are the practical mechanisms, such as pooled funds and shared governance, that help diverse actors connect, coordinate and translate insight into collective action. The work exists; the architecture to connect and accelerate it does not yet.
Five ways into systemic funding for social cohesion
Different funders will enter this field with different priorities. The Coalition identified five recognisable pathways for funders to invest systemically in civility and social cohesion, each with live examples from member proposals.
Places. Back a community to set and deliver its own agenda, the way the pilots led by the Ballarat Foundation, the Mparntwe Alice Springs Community Foundation and Collaboration for Impact (CFI, in Tasmania) are doing. This pathway suits funders who want visible, grounded work and are comfortable with community pace.
Cohort capability. Grow the personal, community or institutional skills that social cohesion work depends on: critical thinking, dialogue and facilitation, organisational capacity building, and civic literacy. Member examples include The Ethics Centre's ethics curriculum, LINA's work with newsrooms, and MAVlab's work with local government. This pathway suits funders who seek specific outcomes for particular cohorts of Australians or organisations.
Connective tissue. Help national actors develop the pooled capital, shared governance and intermediaries that hold the work between organisations. Examples include MLF's call for a national civility endowment and community foundation, CFI's Belonging for All strategy, and Welcoming Australia's work with universities. This pathway suits funders who seek catalytic, field-building impact.
Data. Fund shared measurement that lets the field see itself and tell its story. Intermediaries like PLACE Australia and Community Foundations Australia are working in this space, as are technology and impact consultancies like Purpose Made and Seer Data & Analytics. This pathway suits funders who support research, or who want to strengthen the evidence base for applied work on social cohesion.
Advocacy. Fund media, and the work of making the case to governments and the public, at scale. The joint submission to the Royal Commission that MLF and partners have made is one example; the aligned policy work members identified in the Coalition's third meeting, alongside visibility of existing work and shared resourcing, is another. This pathway suits funders who want to strengthen support and appetite, among governments and the public, for the work of all the other pathways.
What good system-aware initiatives look like here
Across the Coalition's five meetings, the mechanisms that drew the most energy shared a handful of features. They are a useful test for any initiative asking to be funded as part of a system. Draft, reconstructed from the meeting record, to be confirmed.
- It works across more than one level. The initiative connects work at one level of the matrix to another: a local programme that feeds a national picture, or a national framework that local work can align to without being directed by it.
- No single organisation owns it. Governance is shared, and the initiative would keep going if any one member stepped back. Members put most of their energy into coordination for this reason: who decides, who's accountable, and on what terms.
- It builds on what already exists. Members told us the field is short of alignment more than ideas. A good initiative starts by making existing work visible, then connects to it.
- Communities set the agenda. Local people name what matters to them, with facilitation, using the trusted places and local knowledge already in every community.
- It makes the work visible so it can travel. Shared data and measurement let the field see itself, and give what works in one place a route to another.
What good funding looks like here
Coalition members also identified what makes funding effective in this field, drawing on their experience of what actually shifts this system (the system levers from the first-phase interviews):
- Multi-year horizons. Trust-building is slow; twelve-month grants push organisations back into project mode.
- Readiness-aware. The same investment lands differently in different places. Fund the work of understanding readiness alongside delivery.
- Collaborative by design. Grants shaped so organisations contribute to the same picture rather than compete for the same pool.
- Lighter reporting. Members told us shared data infrastructure should lighten the reporting load organisations already carry.
- Participation costed in. The time community organisations give to coordination is real work, particularly for smaller not-for-profits, and should be paid for.
What happens next
This investment framework is one output of the Civility Coalition's first phase of work, in the first half of 2026. The Menzies Leadership Foundation plans to reconvene the Coalition in late 2026 or early 2027 to consider opportunities for collective investment, on the basis of:
- Ongoing local work to reimagine civility in Ballarat (Ballarat Foundation), Tasmania (Collaboration for Impact) and Alice Springs (Mparntwe Alice Springs Community Foundation).
- SFRI's Australian Social Cohesion Summit, and the follow-on collective workshops being convened by the Menzies Leadership Foundation.
- The final report of the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.
Feedback from Civility Coalition members
This draft is for the Coalition to pull apart. If it doesn't align with how you believe funding should support collective work at system level, or if your organisation's work sits somewhere this picture doesn't show, that reaction is the input we need.
Chris and Rohan chris@papergiant.net