This year in support of National Close the Gap Day, Yarn Marketplace is proud to be supporting First Nations Futures (FNF) – a nonprofit, 100% First Nations-led organisation dedicated to redistributing wealth to marginalised First Nations communities.

Close the Gap Day is a day of action to raise awareness about the disparities in health outcomes and life expectancy between First Nations and non-First Nations people across the country. FNF seeks to address funding barriers to local communities who work to close the gap, and from 19th-29th March, $2 from every NAIDOC Polo will go to FNF to support their platform. 

Rona Glynn-McDonald is the founding CEO of Common Ground and co-founder of FNF. Common Ground is a not-for-profit organisation centring voices of First Nations people through storytelling. From her work and own struggles as CEO, she identified many challenges for First Nations organisations when it came to gaining funding.

“From my position within the not-for-profit sector as founding CEO of Common Ground I began to interact with philanthropy and saw how challenging it was for Blackfullas to access funding that was ongoing and autonomous and centred their aspirations and self-determination, and how you needed to have proximity to power privilege and whiteness to get access to funding for organisations and initiatives,” Rona told Yarn Marketplace.

It was when she got together with friend and co-founder Louis Mokak who shared the same sentiments three years ago that they came up with the idea of a FNF fund to give grassroots community organisations a more streamlined approach to gaining funding.

“First Nations Futures is a nonprofit organisation, creating pathways for non-Indigenous people to redistribute wealth to First Nations organisations and initiatives that they're not connected to or that they don't have relationships with that are doing incredible projects and work on the ground in their communities,” Rona said.

“It's about locating the responsibility of settlers and calling on all people that benefit from living off stolen land that aren't holding reciprocity with our communities to step up and start redistributing a portion of their wealth.”

In their first 6 months of operation, FNF are already supporting nine partner community-led organisations with excellent feedback.

“We’ve heard from our partner community organisations that having our extra support is a relief for them, knowing that there's a Blackfulla in their corner who's trying to drive funding,” Rona said.

“And not only through the platform, we have people co-investing directly into the organisations but we’re also connecting organisations with funders that they may not be connected to when we can, and that relief of having Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that are supporting in the wings that really believe in their work is something that is quite powerful.”

For funders and philanthropists, Rona says the feedback they’ve received is that FNF has been addressing a “significant problem” when it comes to those who want to support finding and holding relationships with community organisations.

“Many, many philanthropic entities don't have advisory groups or First Nations people that are leading their strategies around First Nations giving, and as a platform or an organisation, our governance and all the mob we work with who are supporting these organisations and backing them and saying, you know what, these are great spaces to put money in. It means that whitefullas don't need to be doing that work. We can do it for them,” she said.

If you’re interested in learning more about, or investing in First Nations Futures, you can do so by visiting their website 

From 19th-29th March, $2 from every NAIDOC Polo sold will go to First Nations Futures to support their community partners. Discover the collection today.