Social Ventures Australia Partners With Google Impact Challenge

Not for Profit Social Ventures Australia (SVA), which achieves social outcomes through innovation, has teamed up with Google Australia to support this year’s Impact Challenge.

The global technology giant is offering $4.5 million in grants, plus a further $2 million prize pool, to help Australian organisations harness the power of technology and innovation.

SVA was selected as an implementation partner, and will help successful grant applicants to maximise the social impact of their projects.

“We’ll be working with each of the grant recipients to support them to deliver on their big ideas,” venture philanthropy director at SVA, Jenna Palumbo, told Pro Bono Australia News.

“Each grantee will have a tailored plan including support from SVA as well as access to the right resources, networks and mentors to sustain momentum over the longer term.

“We’ll also be supporting Google and the grantees to develop and report on appropriate indicators to measure their progress.”

She said part of SVA’s core mission was partnering with funders like Google to “disrupt the status quo in order to deliver better social outcomes”.

“We’d been talking to Google about opportunities to work together for some time and the Australian Impact Challenge seemed like a perfect opportunity to team up,” she said.

“Having worked with a wide range of social innovators over the past 14 years SVA has a deep understanding of approaches to creating social impact that we’re keen to share in supporting the challenge.

“We’re excited to have the opportunity to work with both Google and the grantee organisations on technology enabled solutions to tackling complex social issues.  

“We think Google’s vast technological expertise, in combination with SVA’s deep expertise in the social sector is going to be a powerful combination in supporting innovative solutions.”

Applications for the Google Impact Challenge are open until 13 July. In October the 10 finalists will be announced and Australia’s can vote for their favourite idea.

The top four grant recipients, three chosen by a judging panel and the forth on public votes, will each receive $750,000. The remaining six finalists will receive $250,000.

Google Australia director of engineering Alan Noble said there were four key criteria.

“Impact is first and foremost… we are specifically looking for proposals that would demonstrate measurable and significant impact,” Noble said.

“Second relates to the use of technology and innovation. We need to understand how technology and how innovation can differentiate what a particular NFP is doing.

“The third is scalability. It is all good to use technology innovation but if you are going to achieve something… then you need to be able to demonstrate that it can be scalable.

“Last is feasibility. It’s critical that the team is able to pull it together and produce a realistic plan and identify all of the partners and all of the issues to move forward.”

This is the second year Google Australia has run its Impact challenge.