About mates
There has to be a better way to do this.
Mates Fund is a registered Australian charity supporting practical, community-led projects across Fiji, Pakistan and Australia.
We were built around a frustration with charity that feels distant from the people it is meant to serve: fundraising without relationship, projects designed from the outside, photos without accountability, and good intentions that do not always become useful support.
Mates exists to do the work differently.
Our name is also our framework: Meaningful, Action, Transparency, Education and Support. These are not branding words. They are the tests we use when deciding what to fund, who to work with, and how to stay responsible for the trust people place in us.
meaningful
In Fiji, there is a tongue-in-cheek colloquialism called “painting the church.”
This is the idea that well-intentioned volunteers come into a community, where they are welcomed with open arms, and proceed to paint the church — which not only does not require painting, but also feels like a meaningless exercise in charity.
This is the kind of charity Mates exists to avoid.
Meaningfulness means we make sure we are getting a broad intersection of the community to assess what the problems are before we even begin on a solution.
When we do come up with solutions, we match the existing academia and research about the problem from the outside world with the capacity and ideas from within the community. This is how we come up with clever solutions which matter to the community in solving the problem they have identified.
This process starts with careful listening: asking who said this was needed, who is leading locally, who benefits, and what would make Mates’ access to resources and funding genuinely meaningful.
action
Action means turning care into something concrete.
We care about taking practical steps: the tank platform, school fees, delivery truck, guttering, books, local builder, emergency supplies, receipts and the follow-up.
We do not just give funds to a middleman to complete projects. We make sure that we are doing the work in community, with the people closest to it, and with a clear understanding of what is happening on the ground.
transparent
Mates is responsible for funding, relationships, decisions and consequences. That means Mates needs records, receipts, clear project notes, financial oversight, policies, board responsibility and honest communication throughout the process.
Transparency is making our work visible for donors, partners, communities and volunteers to understand what happened and why.
As a small charity, we are very proud to have received our ACNC registration, showing that we are meeting those transparency standards.
Part of this transparency is also using our resources as much and as often as we can. This is why having a broad range of volunteers who bring their professional skills to the work we do is as important as ever.
education
Education is based in the idea that if you teach a person to fish, they can feed themselves for life.
We approach all our work with a hand up, not handout mentality. Where we can, we provide opportunities for education — from financial literacy and starting your own business, through to upskilling local labourers in specific skills. Education can mean working in collaboration with local teachers to create scholarships. It can also mean educating local communities about the available resources that can help fund solutions to the problems they are having.
For Mates, education is about giving people the tools, skills, confidence and opportunities to keep building solutions beyond us.
support
Mates is not in the business of taking over from local leadership or making communities dependent on our “saving.”
We exist to back people who are already working towards solutions by helping connect funding, skills, materials, networks and accountability. Support means showing up with respect, staying useful, and remembering that the work is about people, not optics.
We promise to do no harm.
“We exist at the intersection between people who want to help and communities already working toward their own solutions.”
— Charlie Byrne: Founder/Director