Philanthropy for Impact: DIIF Launches Diabetes Translational Research Fund

Diabetes is Australia’s fastest growing chronic condition with an estimated 1.5 million Australians living with diabetes. A person is diagnosed with diabetes in Australia every 8 minutes.

Australia is home to world class diabetes researchers, centres and institutes, despite significant under-investment in the field. Over the past 10 years, National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) funding for diabetes research has declined by 35%, and philanthropic investment continues to trail behind other major health conditions.

As a consequence, Australian diabetes research is internationally recognised and high performing, but the sector is underfunded, making it difficult to plan on a long-term basis and translate research into outcomes for people living with diabetes.

Current levels of support simply aren’t enough to match the scale and urgency of the challenge.

Increasing funding available for diabetes research is central to DIIF’s vision. We believe philanthropic funding can be a powerful catalyst when strategically positioned to leverage other sources. Our Research Fund will focus on partnering with outstanding translational research centres focussed on accelerating research findings into outcomes.

Our funding approach prioritises long term partnerships and core, capacity building support rather than small, one-off competitive grants. This approach aims to maximise the efficiency of our funding, enable research organisations to attract and retain outstanding research leaders, and empower them to pursue high quality research aligned to our research aims, informed by people with lived experience of diabetes.

With five yearly evaluations to measure impact, the fund provides an opportunity for strategically minded philanthropists to support long-term, high impact diabetes research.

Capital raised through the Research Fund will be invested, with the returns directed to the fund’s research partners.

In addition to conventional grants, we’re excited to offer philanthropists the opportunity to support the research fund with a capital impact loan.

The capital impact loan is a new impact investment opportunity for Australian Public and Private Ancillary funds (PAFs), whereby the PAF can ‘loan’ a portion of their philanthropic capital to the fund via a limited recourse, zero- interest rate loan. Loan funds are invested into an ethically screened diversified portfolio of investments by an investment manager and held in a security trust.

The income foregone on the zero-coupon loan will be credited towards the lender’s distribution target each financial year.

The two inaugural research partners of DIIF are the Australian Centre for Behavioural Research into Diabetes and the Australian Centre for Accelerating Diabetes Innovation. Known as the ACBRD and ACADI, these two centres are global leaders in their respective fields of behavioural and clinical diabetes research, with proven track records in delivering real outcomes for people with diabetes. To learn more about their research and the impact they’re making, visit see the partners page of our website.

In time, DIIF will seek to expand its range of research partners as revenue grows from our philanthropic and social enterprise ventures.

If you’re interested in partnering with us to change the trajectory of diabetes research, you can get in touch via the contact page.