FRED receives philanthropic funding boost

Author: Joanna Le, Co-Founder

As we head towards the end of the financial year, we’ve been taking a moment at FRED HQ to reflect on what has been a huge few weeks and a big first year of our 2025–28 Strategic Plan.

FRED was created with a clear vision: a future where all Australians enjoy good oral health and the many benefits it brings.

Our mission is to ensure everyone has access to the resources and support they need to improve and maintain their oral health across their lives.

Over the past year, we’ve been focused on turning that mission into practical action by building partnerships, developing resources, advocating for prevention, and working with trusted community organisations to reach people who are too often left out of current models of oral health care.

This month, that work received two major boosts.

Two new grants to support preventive oral health

We’re thrilled to share that FRED has recently secured two philanthropic grants to help us pilot our prevention-first model in trusted community settings.

The Newcastle Permanent Charitable Foundation has awarded FRED funding to work with The Orchard in Orange, a specialist service supporting women and children who have experienced domestic and family violence.

Together, we’ll co-design preventive oral health training and resources for their team, so they can provide simple, safe and empowering oral health support as part of their everyday work.

We have also received funding through the Canberra Foundations Collaborative to partner with YWCA Canberra in the ACT.

This project will support the development, piloting and evaluation of a digital tool to help people better understand their oral health risks, and the practical steps they can take to care for their mouth and overall wellbeing.

Together, these grants mark an exciting step forward for FRED.

They will help us test our model, build evidence, and show how preventive oral health support can be embedded into the services people already know and trust.

Building momentum for prevention

Oral health is part of overall health and wellbeing. It affects how we eat, speak, learn, work, connect and participate in life.

But for too long, oral health has been treated as separate from the rest of health care.

Australia’s oral health system is still heavily focused on treating disease after it appears. At FRED, we believe there is a major opportunity to invest in prevention, health literacy, workforce capacity and digital resources that make evidence-based oral health information easier to access.

This is especially important for people who face barriers to care, including cost, distance, trauma, disability, racism, housing insecurity or other forms of disadvantage.

Preventive oral health support should not be a luxury. It should be available to everyone, throughout life.

Growing our reach

As a young organisation, we’re proud of the momentum we’ve built over the past year.

We’ve continued to grow relationships across government, health, prevention, research, advocacy, community services and philanthropy.

We’ve contributed to policy conversations, presented at conferences, developed new partnerships and shared our work through blogs, newsletters and social media.

Our public channels are also growing, helping us reach more partners, funders, collaborators and supporters.

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