Cooperative Initiatives Grants Program: 2025-2029 Grant Opportunity

Overview

The Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) is the national workplace relations regulator. The FWO’s purpose is to promote harmonious, productive, cooperative and compliant workplace relations in Australia.  Cooperation in the workplace has been shown to provide mutually reinforcing benefits for both businesses and workers through higher levels of economic output, better wages and conditions, and increased trust and retention. The Cooperative Initiatives Grants Program (the program) will fund organisations to partner with other organisations to collaboratively work to identify and resolve workplace issues and promote compliance and positive change across the spectrum of workplace participants. The objectives of the program are: to promote harmonious, productive and compliant workplaces by fostering sustainable partnerships across the spectrum of workplace participants and cooperative engagement with the FWO to assist initial development of innovative multi-stakeholder mechanisms that will create systemic and long-lasting change to facilitate the provision of assistance to workers and employers covered by the federal workplace relations system. The intended outcomes of the program are: to embed cooperative practices to monitor compliance and prevent non-compliance with Commonwealth workplace laws to build capacity of multi-stakeholder mechanisms to deliver meaningful, long-term improvements to workplace practices and relationships to prevent non-compliance with Commonwealth workplace laws, create systemic change and/or address drivers of non-compliance.