In the past year the Melbourne Community Foundation-Social Justice Fund has made grants to developing countries that provide safe drinking water and improved sanitation and health in Ethiopia, India, Malawi, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Uganda. 

Grants have also been provided to women and girls, and the poorest of the poor, with education and income-earning opportunities in Bangladesh, India, Laos, Malawi, Nepal, the Philippines, South Africa, a refugee camp in Thailand, East Timor, Uganda and Vietnam. 

Within Australia grants have benefited indigenous infants, children and youth, public school students, refugee women and youth with mental health issues.  There have also been grants supporting a new progressive think tank, (Per Capita), the campaign by Australians for Affordable Housing, and research by ACOSS into poverty in Australia.

Some information about the Projects of the Social Justice Fund

• Social Justice Grants 2007 - 2008(PDF)
• Background Information (PDF)
• Ethiopia Visit 2005 Water is Life (PDF)
• Ethiopia Visit 2005 Tale of 3 Villages (PDF)

Why the fund was started?

My father, Paul Morawetz, arrived in Australia with my mother Dita in early 1940 as European refugees from Hitler. I could not begin to tell here the long story of my father's remarkable life. Fortunately, the story has already been told in his biography, What A Life, by Gloria Frydman (Adelaide, Wakefield Press, 1995).

At some level, I knew that I might one day inherit a share of the significant financial assets that my father built up after he arrived in Australia. However, my father always seemed pretty immortal to me, so in most ways, I lived my life as if the possibility of my inheriting money did not exist.

Sadly, in April 2001 at the age of 86, my father died. I did indeed inherit a share of his estate, which turned out to be far more money than I had ever expected to have. It was clear to me that I wanted to use most of this money to do something, no matter how small, to reduce social and economic injustice, and inequality of opportunity. I am eternally grateful to my father for providing me with the opportunity to do this. I am grateful to him, too, for the chance to test how deeply held my egalitarian beliefs are. I am happy to find that they are deeply held indeed.

I would like to reiterate my deep gratitude to my father for leaving the inheritance which has enabled me to set up the Social Justice Fund. I feel privileged to have been able to do so. I am extremely grateful, too, to the Melbourne Community Foundation, under whose auspices the Fund has been established. MCF's (then) Executive Officer, Helen Imber, was most helpful - with her cheerful assistance, the process of setting up the Fund was much easier than I had expected. A stand-alone foundation (which was the alternative to setting up a Fund under MCF) would have been far more difficult to set up and maintain.

It is my hope that the Social Justice Fund will be passed on down the generations, to play a small role in promoting social and economic justice, reducing inequality of opportunity, and making the world a fairer place. I am delighted that my three children, Deb, Ben and Simon, have already shown an interest in it. I hope that they will take it over when I am gone, and then pass it on to their children, and their children's children…

DAVID MORAWETZ
Founder and Director,
Social Justice Fund