A weekend of welcome
This is the story of how a small grant helped families begin again in Australia and an invitation to imagine what your community could do next.
Picture a clearing in the Royal National Park. Children playing between the trees. Parents walking with a careers adviser, talking through resumes and job interviews. Shared meals, board games, and for families who have experienced trauma, loss and displacement, a first, unhurried taste of what it feels like to simply belong.
This is the Welcome Weekend: a two-day residential weekend run by the Josephite Justice Network (JJN) for refugee and asylum seeker families. Last year, it was made possible by a Community Grant from Mary MacKillop Today.
More than a weekend away
The Welcome Weekend reaches well beyond a family’s material needs. Across one weekend, families build social connections, learn about the support services around them, and meet local community members who are genuinely glad they are here. It lays a foundation: for people to feel included and connected to wider networks, and able to begin their new life in a new country feeling safe and supported.
The design is deceptively simple. Each family is paired with a trained volunteer who stays alongside them for the whole weekend. There are bushwalks and games for the children; for parents, there is practical support, career advice, information, and the space to ask the questions that are hard to ask anywhere else. In recent years the families arriving have come from as far as Fiji and the Solomon Islands, and before that many were Arabic-speaking families still finding their first words of English.
What stays with the team, though, is never the run sheet. It is the young volunteers, some who first came along as school students and have kept returning year after year, who are still in touch with the families they walked beside. It is the participant who wrote afterwards, at length, about what the weekend had meant to him. And it is the quiet message underneath it all: that you are welcome in your new home, you are seen and you are heard.
What a Community Grant makes possible
The Welcome Weekend is one story among many. Community Grants from Mary MacKillop Today are deliberately close to the ground, up to $10,000 for practical, community-led projects that open up learning, strengthen connection, and help communities thrive.
Inspired by Saint Mary MacKillop, who taught in places others overlooked, the program has for more than 20 years backed projects that improve equity in education, build economic independence, and strengthen community participation. The Sisters of Saint Joseph Stream is open only to the Sisters of Saint Joseph and their associates.
Could your project be next?
If you are part of the Sisters of Saint Joseph or an associate, and you have an idea that responds to a real need in your community, we would love to hear from you. We look for projects that:
- respond to a genuine community need and set out to change it
- align with our focus on lifelong learning and community-led change
- strengthen the community, building skills, leadership, networks or resources that last beyond the project
- can show their impact through a simple evaluation and a plan for managing risks
- build toward something sustainable, through partnerships or a path to continue once funding ends
Because the grants are small, priority goes to organisations below the annual revenue threshold and to projects that would struggle to find funding elsewhere.
How to apply
- Go to the Mary MacKillop Today website
- Download the guidelines check that your organisation and project qualify.
- Review ‘What we look for’ in the Guidelines document and respond to each point clearly.
- Line up two referees who can speak to your organisation’s capacity, the project’s likely impact, and the need behind it. If your project works with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, at least one referee must be an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person with the cultural authority to speak to it.
- Complete the online application form on the Mary MacKillop Today website via the ‘Apply Now’ button.
Applications are accepted for one round each year, and late submissions cannot be considered. This year’s grants open on 17 August at 9:00am.
We walk alongside you
If your application is successful, we don’t simply hand over the funds and step back. We ask grant partners to share their story, always with consent, and with real care where a project involves people experiencing vulnerability, to provide a short progress report and a final report, and to give a simple financial acquittal. We supply every template at the right time, so the process stays light, transparent, and easy to keep on top of.
Not sure if your idea fits?
That is exactly the kind of conversation we like. Call (02) 8912 2777 or email hello@marymackilloptoday.org.au before you apply, we would be glad to help you think it through.
Because sometimes the project that looks small on paper – a weekend in the bush, a family paired with a friend – turns out to be the very thing that helps someone believe they are, at last, home.
Mary MacKillop Today