Our flagship Prevention Partnerships support widely accessible and innovative preventative health initiatives that encourage Australians to adopt healthy lifestyles and reduce risk factors for chronic disease.

We’re proud to have partnered with 18 charities since 2008 providing funding of $100,000 to $500,000 per year over a number of years to develop, pilot, scale and evaluate new approaches.

Application to this program is by invitation only. Prevention Partnerships are identified proactively, and on an ad hoc basis as a vacancy in this program becomes available.

You can submit your interest to hear about our upcoming funding opportunities here.

Prevention Partnerships program overview

nib foundation's Prevention Partnerships program aims to help people and communities live healthier lives.

We seek to support innovative health promotion and primary prevention initiatives that help Australian youth and young adults reduce modifiable health risks including, but not limited to; drinking alcohol at risky levels, smoking tobacco, physical inactivity, poor diet and obesity.

Our Prevention Partnerships program supports a small number of organisations over several years to develop, pilot, scale and evaluate widely accessible new approaches that encourage people to make positive lifestyle choices.

The foundation distributes more than $1.5 million in grants each year, with around 70% of this budget allocated to ongoing and new Prevention Partnerships. There are no set funding rounds as potential partners are identified proactively based on strategic priorities and available budget.

Prevention Partnerships funding priorities

Our funding priorities are underpinned by the fact that far too many Australians die prematurely or live for many years with suboptimal health and wellbeing related to chronic illness.

Many of the leading chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, mental health disorders, some cancers, and back pain share the same and multiple risk factors.

The current Australian Burden of Disease study reports that 31% of this disease burden is preventable, being due to modifiable risk factors including:

• Smoking tobacco

• Consuming alcohol at risky levels

• Physical inactivity

• Poor diet

• High body mass index

While these risk factors are the biggest contributors, we are also interested in initiatives that target other lifestyle risk factors that contribute significantly to chronic ill health.

We seek to fund unique and practical health promotion and primary prevention initiatives that are widely accessible and help everyday Australian youth and young adults to:

• Increase health knowledge and skills

• Improve health related attitudes and beliefs

• Take action to improve health related lifestyle

• Develop and maintain motivation for behaviour change

We are interested in initiatives that achieve one of more of the following:

• Use new and existing technology and digital health solutions

• Create a community of support that encourages health promoting behaviours

• Are multi-faceted and work to foster cultural change as well as providing support at an individual level

• Collaborate to translate new evidence into practice in the community in a way that is practical, scalable and sustainable

This program does not provide funding for pure or medical research, or clinical trials

Prevention Partnerships assessment criteria

nib foundation's grant programs are very competitive. Applicants that are invited to progress from the EOI stage to submit a full application will be required to:

• Articulate a well-developed understanding of how the proposed program will engage Australian youth and younger adults to address our funding priorities

• Present a compelling rationale based on existing evidence and show a commitment to build new evidence and share learnings through robust evaluation

• Demonstrate that your organisation's strategic focus, geographic footprint and capability can support the design, promotion, implementation and sustainability of a high quality and engaging program

• Establish a simple and practical framework for accurately measuring and reporting the number of people benefiting and how well the program is achieving its intended outcomes

• Present a considered and clear budget that represent good value for money against comparable projects

• Describe why we are the right corporate foundation to support this program and how the broader nib health funds group might be involved.