With the end of another incredibly difficult year upon us, we wanted to take this small moment to reflect with you, in a way that will, hopefully, meet you where you’re at.
We’ve long believed that our work is about much more than just mortgages. And so this year, we're continuing our tradition of celebrating the year that was in a way that, we believe, is far more meaningful than ‘numbers’ or ‘growth’...
In stories.
Stories of purpose and impact. Stories of the real people we’re so lucky to be able to welcome into our community. Stories of the organisations creating real change and whose work it is a privilege to be able to support. But above all, stories that show us a glimpse of what can happen when money is used to serve its actual purpose: of making the full, creative, connected kind of life we all deserve, possible.
FINANCE
Christine
Christine
- House, built late 1950s
- 5 bed, 3 bath, 2 car
- Dharawal Country – Gymea Bay, NSW
For over 30 years, Christine has tended the roots she and her daughters have put down in their Gymea Bay home. But when financial pressure threatened to uproot them, the right support allowed Christine an unexpected, but no less welcome, opportunity – the ability to step confidently into a new chapter of her life, on her own terms…
FOR GOOD
First Nations Futures & CORENA
PAY THE RENT
First Nations Futures
“EOFY is a moment to lead with your values. We can't change our past, but we can pave the way for a better future together.”
Barbie-Lee Kirby
Ngemba, Wailwan, Paakintyi-Maraura, Gamilaraay, and Yuwaalaraay
Executive Director, First Nations Futures
Each end of financial year (EOFY), millions of people donate to minimise their tax obligations, with estimates showing that 30-40% of annual donations occur in June alone. Yet First Nations people remain systematically excluded from this charitable surge, with only 0.9% of philanthropic funding in so-called Australia reaching First Nations community organisations.
First Nations Futures exists to change this reality by delivering long-term, unrestricted and culturally safe funding to their growing network of First Nations community partners, offering a way for those that have benefited from colonisation to meaningfully and practically reckon with the past and resource the future.
In 2025, First Nations Futures launched their ‘EOFY: Justice, Not Just Returns’ Campaign (June 9 - 30) inviting individuals, businesses and philanthropists to reframe this time of year from being one for reducing your tax burden to a time for increasing your contribution to First Nations justice. The campaign saw First Nations Futures successfully reach their $400k funding target, allowing for the redirection of $40k to each community partner in support of their important work investing in cultural strengthening, climate justice, youth justice, healing and wellbeing, and language revival.
The campaign was also a powerful piece of advocacy work, inviting us all to reflect on the ways that income, property ownership and business profits in so-called Australia have been built on dispossession - and how genuine repair requires redistributing wealth and addressing the funding inequities that systematically exclude First Nations community organisations.
While EOFY might be over, every day is a good day to redistribute wealth and to support the important, justice-centred work of First Nations Futures.
FOR THE PLANET
CORENA
“Our ambition is to substantially increase the number of projects we can fund this year. We already have two of our largest ever community energy projects confirmed – with more to come!”
Georgia Cooke
Chair, CORENA
The Citizens Own Renewable Energy Network Australia (CORENA) is a grassroots climate charity, harnessing people power to support community-driven climate action. Their vision is simple but incredibly effective: they provide no interest loans to fund practical, emission-reducing projects that would otherwise be unlikely to occur, and invite everyone to chip in and collectively pay for project costs.
CORENA's innovative approach centres on their ‘revolving’ fund model. Projects are selected based on their capacity to reduce carbon emissions, while also cutting operating costs. The savings generated by funded projects are used to cover loan repayments, which then flow back into the fund to be re-lent and support subsequent projects. This means donated funds can be used repeatedly, multiplying their impact and achieving climate benefits far into the future.
Practical projects that benefit local communities are at the heart of CORENA’s approach to tackling the climate emergency, which includes: renewable energy (solar panels and batteries), energy efficiency, getting off gas, and electric vehicles. Each project is tailored to the specific needs of the organisation and includes an education component to ensure the solutions provided genuinely address their needs.
To date, CORENA has loaned over $1.5 million to a range of emission reducing projects, funded entirely from donations made by everyday Australians who share the organisation’s vision for a world in which everyone who wants a safe climate is empowered to help achieve it.
FINANCE
Kirsty & Charlotte
Kirsty + Charlotte
- Apartment, built 1970s
- 3 bed, 1 bath, 1 car
- Dharug (Darug) Country - Meadowbank, NSW
For many people, though particularly women, homeownership is about much more than just wealth creation. It's about stability, security, and having the freedom to live a life that is uniquely their own. For lifelong friends Kirsty and Charlotte, buying a home together was how they each set out to provide the other with exactly that…
READ KIRSTY & CHARLOTTE’S STORY
FOR GOOD
Mudgin-Gal & The Australian Climate Case
PAY THE RENT
Mudgin-Gal
‘The work of Mudgin-Gal is a testament to what happens when Aboriginal women lead: we create not just data, but change; not just policy evidence, but community empowerment’….
“That’s why Mudgin-Gal is so vital. For more than 30 years, it’s been the heart of this community — a safe place for women and families, run by Aboriginal women, for Aboriginal women.”
Distinguished Professor Larissa Behrendt AO
Speech: Mudgin-Gal Yarns Podcast Launch
Mudgin-Gal (‘Women’s Place’) is a community-based Aboriginal service located in Redfern/Gadigal, that is managed and staffed by Aboriginal women, for Aboriginal women. They deliver support, referrals and community-based services to Aboriginal women and families and, since opening in 1992, remains the only service of this nature in the Metropolitan Sydney area.
A leader in domestic and family violence prevention, Mudgin-Gal promotes an anti-violence message in all of its work, with its award-winning model and programs having been adapted state-wide.
Led by CEO Ashlee Donohue, a proud Dunghutti Woman, Mudgin-Gal acts as a safe haven and provides active support to women, girls and their families through a peer-to-peer approach. While offering a drop-in centre, where women can safely access essential goods and services, such as laundry & shower facilities, sanitary products, internet access and fresh food, they also provide a wide variety of parenting programs, playgroups and art classes, all designed to provide a source of positive cultural and social networking. Through their important work, Mudgin-Gal is equipping women and young girls with the self esteem, confidence and life skills they need to become role models for their own children and families and, by extension, for their community.
More recently, Mudgin-Gal launched their groundbreaking podcast and research project, ‘Mudgin-Gal Yarns’ – a five-part podcast series, providing a platform for inner-city Aboriginal women to speak openly about their experiences with the systems that are supposed to protect them: police, government, and services. Their candid conversations, featuring voices rarely heard in the national conversation, explore what works, what fails, and importantly, what needs to change. You can listen to ‘Mudgin-Gal Yarns’ here.
Mudgin-Gal is currently run through the efforts of volunteers, and receives intermittent funding from state and federal government sources on a project-by-project basis. As such, the breadth, depth and continuity of the services they provide are under constant threat, with day-to-day administration and other critical requirements unfunded.
FOR THE PLANET
The Australian Climate Case - Appeal Fund
“We have no choice but to keep fighting for our future generations and for our identity. Everything we are is connected to our islands, and without Boigu and Saibai we will have nothing.”
Uncle Pabai and Uncle Paul
Uncle Pabai and Uncle Paul are Guda Maluyligal Traditional Owners from Boigu and Saibai Islands in Zenadth Kes (the Torres Strait). With the Uncles and their communities faced with rising sea levels, tides flooding their homes, sacred land eroding into the sea and soil becoming too salty to grow food, they took the Australian Government to court in 2021 for failing to act on, and prevent, climate change. Their argument? Due to this failure, the Federal Government has negligently and unlawfully breached its duty of care to the Torres Strait community.
In July this year, the Federal Court handed down its decision on the case in Gumuy/Cairns. In it, Justice Wigney found that the Torres Strait Islands, people and culture are being “ravaged by human induced climate change” and that climate change poses “an existential threat to the whole of humanity”. He said that the Australian Government does not “currently” have a legal duty of care to protect Torres Strait people from climate harm and that it is not open to a “single judge of this Court to expand the Australian common law of negligence”.
On behalf of us all and backed by an army of supporters right across the country, the Uncles are set to challenge this decision in the Full Federal Court. Their legal team will argue that the judge erred in several of his legal conclusions, and put to the court that: the Commonwealth does owe a duty of care to Torres Strait Islanders in relation to climate change; the Commonwealth’s additional emissions are a legal cause of harm to Torres Strait Islanders; and cultural harm is compensable under Australian law.
In the Uncle's own words:
“Since the decision, we have sat with community on our islands and listened to the rhythms of our mothers, Boigu and Saibai. We have sat at our kitchen tables with our children as climate change ravages Country and takes their future piece by piece by piece…The moral burden of this case has been heavy, but we know we are not alone.”
FOLLOW:
We are, once again, so grateful to have been part of so many important milestones for our community members this year. And in doing so, to also be in a position to support some truly inspirational people and organisations, working tirelessly to make the world a better place – for all of us.
And while this year has been a particularly difficult one for many, if you’re able to and are looking to offer your own support to some important work happening this holiday season, the organisations listed above, and on the Pure Community website, are all great places to start.