Karinya House has very gratefully received a significant grant from the Paul Ramsay Foundation as part of their 2023 Open Grant Round for Specialist Domestic and Family Violence (DFV) Support. In total, the Paul Ramsay Foundation committed a total of $13.6 million in funding to 58 organisations working with key cohorts and communities affected DFV across Australia. These grants aimed to engage specialist support services working with specific groups, including First Nations communities, children, migrant and refugee communities, rural and remote communities, pregnant women, LGBTIQA+ communities, single mothers, women with a disability, and perpetrators and users of violence. Karinya House is honoured and humbled to be part of this network.  

A Learning Paper summarising the insights of this network, including insights from Karinya House has recently been published and is available here: 

With generous support from the Paul Ramsay Foundation, Karinya House is undertaking a two-year project over July 2023 to June 2025, to develop a comprehensive evaluation framework which incorporates meaningful ways for women with lived experience to provide feedback on our services.  

The project’s focus on creating space for authentic feedback aligns closely with our long-standing Practice Framework, which supports individualised, women-led and trauma-informed support. Feedback derived from women will be used to guide reflective practice and to design and implement ongoing service improvements to ensure Karinya House continues to deliver effective and impactful services.

The generous support from the Paul Ramsay Foundation has so far been used to:  

  • undertake consultations with staff and women to develop and refine an evaluation approach;  
  • refine the implementation of our existing case management tool to ensure we are consistently recording case management outcomes at an individual level;  
  • conduct a review of academic literature and service-based approaches of evaluation methodologies that could inform our work, and;  
  • design and implement a pilot feedback survey administered to women with current and recent involvement of our service.  

Over the coming months, more surveys will be conducted and data will be analysed. We will also be commencing a pilot survey involving women with past experiences at Karinya House, which will be used to design an approach to collecting data from women about the ‘longitudinal’ impact of Karinya House on their lives.  

As we refine the feedback mechanisms and data collection strategies, the project will culminate in the development of a considered and rigorous evaluation framework which can guide Karinya House’s impact measurement work over the coming years. This work is increasingly important to help Karinya remain competitive in a crowded, outcomes-focused funding landscape.  

We are extremely grateful for the support of the Paul Ramsay Foundation for their commitment to this work, which is helping to ensure that Karinya House continues to deliver high-quality, impactful services for women and children in the Canberra region for as long as is required.