Sixteen not-for-profit community organisations have been awarded funding through the TasNetworks Community Grants Program for 2024.
With a focus on alleviating cost-of-living pressures and enhancing community resilience, these grants are supporting initiatives that make a tangible difference in the lives of many Tasmanians according to TasNetworks.
Among the successful applicants is Kingborough Community Missions, which will use the grant to purchase a new commercial freezer, enhancing food relief efforts across southern Tasmania.
Kingborough Community Missions founders and co-ordinators Peter and Patricia Harvey said the grant would help ensure the service continued to help those in need.
“Kingborough Community Missions Food Aid Program donates up to 14,000 nutritious meals, 380 grocery hampers, and 40 tonnes of donated fresh vegetables per year to approximately 9510 people in need including homeless people and families,” they said.
“This food aid is distributed through 18 outlets in southern Tasmania, from the D’Entrecasteux Channel, the Huon Valley through Kingston, and Hobart to the Tasman Peninsula and thanks to this grant and our 40 volunteers assisting us throughout the year, we will be in good stead to keep on supporting those in need, while also reducing waste.”
TasNetworks Chief Executive Officer, Seán McGoldrick, highlighted the importance of the grants in building strong community partnerships.
“We received 188 applications for funding under our Community Grants Program this year, all focused on supporting local communities through cost-of-living relief and strengthening community resilience,” he said.
“We’re proud of our successful applicants and the meaningful projects they are delivering.”
The TasNetworks Community Grants Program offers grants of up to $10,000 each, awarded annually.
- GroWaverley
Providing free meals to community and residents at a disability service. Providing 100 free meals per fortnight, fostering stronger community ties.
- Zeehan RSL
A new oven for the kitchen, allowing the RSL to continue to provide free meals to veterans and affordable options for the west coast community.
- Eastcoast Regional Development Organisation
Sponsoring workshops on Tasmania’s east coast, empowering locals with skills for the new economy.
- Panchajanya Community Garden
Expanding their Cygnet community garden and new rainwater tanks allows them to grow more free produce for the community.
- Centacare Evolve Housing
Providing driving lessons to young apprentices from disadvantaged backgrounds in southern Tasmania.
- Kingborough Community Missions
A new commercial freezer, enhancing food relief efforts across southern Tasmania, reducing waste and increasing support to those in need.
- Huon Valley PCYC
Providing nutritious school lunches for children who turn up to school without.
- Swanwick Community Association
Breaking ground on a new community garden on the east coast, fostering community engagement and growth.
- Glenorchy Community Care
Funding new energy-efficient freezers to boost food relief in Hobart’s northern suburbs, replacing their well-outdated equipment.
- Cremorne Community Group
Installing a community firefighting water tank, helping to solve a fire safety risk in an area without access to town water.
- Variety Tasmania
Expanding their successful breakfast club model to Rosebery High and Zeehan Primary, ensuring kids on the west coast start the day right.
- Royal Life Saving Tasmania
Training community volunteers in lifeguarding, allowing Mole Creek’s community pool to reopen after two years of closures.
- Marine Rescue Ulverstone
Upgrades to vital VHF radio equipment to ensure the safety of mariners and volunteers along Tasmania’s north-west coast.
- Youth, Family and Community Connections
The ARVOs Program in Devonport and Burnie is providing young people a space where they can build their confidence, social skills, resilience and connection.
- Parklands High School
Creating a new community garden in Burnie, to be open to all, and strengthening community ties with the school.
- Gunns Plains Community Centre
Delivering essential upgrades to the community centre.
Ben Marshall
September 27, 2024 at 11:27
All of these recipients are, no doubt, worthy of support, but why is TasNetworks, a corporatised transmission company, handing out cash? In short, they’re buying social licence.
For those not yet aware, TasNetworks has been engaged in a PR war on North West communities which will be impacted by TasNet’s proposed North West Transmission Development – a vast new transmission grid designed to connect private energy investors (like the Filipino billionaires behind the world’s worst wind energy project, namely Robbins Island) to the Mainland market.
We’ll pay for this new infrastructure even though it doesn’t benefit us, and even though no genuine business case has been done nor any independent costs-benefits analysis.
As a result, on the advice of the expensive corporate PR companies they hire, TasNetworks has spent tens of millions on PR and “community engagement” which includes the buying of social license via ‘community benefits grants’. The communities most impacted, including materially, are ignored, because they’re still fighting TasNetworks’ rotten plans.
Where will the money come from for these purchases of social goodwill? It’ll come from our power bills, just as it will for the new grid that backs the four planned Marinus Links in exporting privately-owned wind energy offshore.
When TasNetworks hand these carefully chosen groups some cash, it’s a transaction. The community gets a small amount of money, and in return TasNetworks get positive PR exposure and social license to industrialise our farms and forests for the benefit of foreign investors. They also get to gold-plate their assets and to supply ‘efficiency dividends’ to their shareholder, namely the Minister and the Treasurer. All on our dime.
When TasNet claim it’s doing this because it has “a focus on alleviating cost-of-living pressures and enhancing community resilience” – they’re simply lying.
And these liars, operating in their own interests, and against ours, are the appointed Jurisdictional Planners of the Energy Sector, and they’re using us as their personal ATM. It’s all legal, but it’s all utterly corrupt.