Healthy Together grants

About Healthy Together grants

Healthy Together grants support communities to come together to collaborate and work towards a shared vision for health and wellbeing using a place-based approach.

Two grants are for Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations, while the other five grants are for place-based communities in Clarence, Derwent Valley, Southern Midlands, Tasman, and the West Coast.

Healthy Together funding

The grants are for $300,000 over three years for each community.

Communities can use this funding in many ways to improve local health and wellbeing. These grants are flexible, so communities can test ideas and adjust as they go and get support from the Healthy Tasmania team based on community needs.

Funding can be used to build capacity, bring people together to problem solve and identify shared priorities, take action, connect existing efforts, harness local skills, and enhance community leadership. It is not for clinical service delivery.

Selection of communities

Instead of applying for a grant, communities were selected by considering existing programs and funding in communities, areas of need, and a willingness and interest in working together to make a difference.

Grant activities

A host organisation has been appointed in each community and will manage the funding agreement on behalf of the community.

Each community is in the early stages of planning which involves bring together local partners and developing ways of working agreements and local decision-making frameworks.

Our role in the Department of Health is to support each community as needed including: 

• helping facilitate agreed ways of working and governance models for community-driven decision making
• making health and wellbeing data easily accessible at a local government level and providing an online data platform that the community can use to add in their own data and stories
• supporting the community to make sense of the data and stories to plan for action
• providing information and access to evidence-based preventive health approaches
• connecting communities together to share their learning
• support the overall evaluation of the Healthy Together grants.

We are using a collaborative and community-led approach and focusing on building community strengths for the longer-term. There is growing evidence to show these approaches are essential for building community prevention systems and can help address complex issues and health equity.

Together, we can make a difference and build healthier, happier communities.

Community data dashboards

We are piloting a data dashboard with Healthy Together communities to make health and wellbeing data easily accessible.