Funding to improve community capabilities that provide economic and social benefits to regional and remote areas

You are not eligible if you are:

• a for-profit organisation
• an individual, partnership or trust (however, an incorporated trustee may apply on behalf of a non-for-profit trust organisation)
• a Commonwealth, state or territory government agency or body (including government business enterprises) with the exception of those organisations referred to in section 4.1 of the grant opportunity guidelines
• a university, technical college, school or hospital
• a Regional Development Australia committee

Infrastructure activities as defined in Appendix B of the grant opportunity guidelines are not eligible for the Community Investments Stream. If your project involves infrastructure activities you should apply under the Infrastructure Projects Stream.

Your project must be in an eligible area. You will need to show this in your application by providing the latitude and longitude of your project location.

Our mapping tool will help you determine your project location and its eligibility.

Use the Building Better Regions Fund map tool.

We assess your application against the eligibility criteria and then against the assessment criteria. Only eligible applications will proceed to the assessment stage.

The amount of detail and supporting evidence you provide in your application should be relative to the project size, complexity and grant amount requested. You should define, quantify and provide evidence to support your answers. The sample application form displays character limits.

We provide recommendations to the Ministerial Panel on which projects to fund. The Ministerial Panel will make the final decision.

We will only consider funding applications that score at least 60% against each assessment criterion, as these represent best value for money.

• Assessment criterion 1: Economic benefits of your project for the region (15 points).
• Assessment criterion 2: Social benefits of your project for the region (15 points).
• Assessment criterion 3: Capacity, capability and resources to deliver the project (5 points).
• Assessment criterion 4: Impact of funding on your project (5 points)

We may make an initial payment on execution of the grant agreement. We will make subsequent payments as you achieve milestones in arrears, based on your actual eligible expenditure. Milestone payments are subject to satisfactory progress on the project.

Note that if you request an upfront initial payment, we will request additional financial information from you, to verify your organisation is unable to cover the costs associated with your project without that initial grant payment.

We set aside at least 10 per cent of the total grant funding for the final payment. We will pay this when you submit a satisfactory end of project report demonstrating you have completed outstanding obligations for the project.

Payments will be made by direct credit into a nominated bank account.