Why Grants Made Clubs Fragile

In the comment thread under Michael Connelly's LinkedIn piece on grassroots sport, Neal Ames put something on the page that most people in community sport think but won't say. Ames, who plans recreation and open space for Midcoast Council and sits on the Parks and Leisure Australia National Advisory, wrote:

At the moment grants are keeping weak clubs alive, that should be killed off, thus allowing the strong to survive, to get bigger and provide the sports services that the community wants. At the end of the day clubs are just a mechanism to achieve the goal of delivering sports services.

If you've sat on a committee, that sentence stings. It's also broadly true, and the bit that makes it true is the bit nobody likes to argue with publicly.

Connelly's reply didn't disagree. He gave the specific kind of grant Ames was describing its proper name: "hand sanitiser grants." Small, recurring, equipment-shaped pots of money. The COVID-era goodies. The annual fifteen hundred dollars from the local member for a defibrillator. The council community fund that drips a few hundred dollars per club per year for ground maintenance. None of it is bad on its own. Added up across a decade, it has produced a generation of clubs that quietly depend on government for the costs of being a small business.

The argument in this piece is that the funding model many Australian clubs run on has made them less resilient, not more. And that real sustainability runs through a different model, one that requires a different conversation with state bodies, with councils, and with members.

What recurring small grants train clubs to do

Picture a club that gets $1,500 a year from council for general operating costs. Here's what happens. The club stops trying to find $1,500 a year through its own activity. Sponsorship efforts get a little less serious because the budget already balances. Membership fees stay flat because raising them is politically uncomfortable and the maths doesn't require it. The merchandise idea gets parked. The summer skills clinic that could run at a small profit doesn't get organised because nobody has time, and nobody has time because the secretary is doing administration.

The grant has done its stated job. The club has its $1,500. What it's also done, quietly, is crowd out the muscle the club would have built if the money hadn't been there. Year ten arrives. The council reviews the programme. The grant gets cut. The club has lost both the money and the institutional capacity it would have developed to replace it.

This is the dependency loop Ames was pointing at, and it survives because it's politically impossible to argue against. No councillor wants to be the one who pulled funding from the local junior footy club. The grants persist because they're a cheap way to look supportive. The cost is paid downstream, by the clubs themselves, in the form of revenue muscles that never got used.

What grants are good at

This isn't an anti-grants argument. Grants do useful things. They just do them badly when they're aimed at the wrong things.

Grants are great for one-off capability leaps. A new clubhouse roof. A capital purchase that opens a new revenue stream. A consultant to help with strategic planning. A subsidy to a club's first paid administrator for the first two years, on the condition that the club has built the revenue to fund the role from year three.

Grants are not great for BAU. Annual top-ups for ongoing operational costs train clubs to design their budgets around an external source that isn't actually stable. The same money, if it were funnelled into one big capability investment — a payment platform, a sponsorship strategy, a part-time admin role — would generate ten years of returns instead of one.

Peak bodies and councils that do grants well already know this. The ones who don't are funding the wrong things and quietly wondering why their clubs aren't more sustainable.

What sustainable revenue looks like for a grassroots club

Anthony Phung, a teacher in the Queensland Department of Education and a parent close to community sport, asked the right follow-up question in the thread. "What do these diversified revenue streams actually look like?" The old model is rego plus a sausage sizzle plus a chocolate drive. What's the new one?

Honest answer: most clubs have three or four revenue streams sitting underused.

Membership pricing is the first one. Most community clubs charge less than they need to. A thirty-dollar increase per member, framed clearly and tied to a specific improvement (better coach education, better facilities, a paid administrator), is almost always accepted by members and almost never proposed by committees. Nick Thornton, who sits on a junior club committee on the Gold Coast, made exactly this point in the thread. The fear of charging more is bigger than the actual resistance from members.

Sponsorship that isn't a banner on a fence is the second. A real sponsorship programme is a small number of named partners with multi-year commitments, an annual report on the value delivered, and a relationship that survives the volunteer rotation. Most clubs sell ground signage. The clubs that have actually built sponsorship into a revenue stream sell access — to a community, to a demographic, to an audience. Mike Morris, who works in data intelligence for sport, was making this point about audience-led partnerships in his comment on the thread.

Programme revenue is the third. Holiday clinics. Coaching courses. Adult social leagues that run between seasons. Skills days for kids from other clubs. The capacity already exists. The club has the venue, the coaches, and a membership list to market to. What stops most committees from running it is the operational lift. Which is one of the reasons software matters in this conversation. Time that gets freed up from chasing renewals tends to flow into programme revenue, because programme revenue is what volunteers find rewarding to build.

Member-facing services is the fourth. Apparel. Merchandise. Member discount partnerships with local businesses. A small e-commerce operation tied to the membership platform. Most clubs abandoned this years ago because the tooling was painful. The tooling isn't painful anymore.

This is where platforms like TidyHQ earn their place in the conversation. Not because software fixes sustainability. It doesn't. But because the operational friction that's stopping clubs from running revenue activities is what software actually removes, and the clubs we work with most often describe the unlock the same way: "now we've got time to do the things we always meant to do."

The role of state and peak bodies

Clubs can't do this alone. State sporting organisations and peak bodies have a role here that most aren't playing yet.

Connelly's argument about shared services is the operational version of that role. Anand Pillay, CEO of Parks and Leisure Australia, agreed in the same thread that this is a conversation the industry needs to have. The model goes like this: state bodies stop pretending each affiliated club is a self-sufficient small business, and start running back-office functions centrally for clubs that need them. Bookkeeping. Compliance. Insurance. Grant management. Coordinated fundraising and sponsorship.

Christopher Davis, CEO of Little Athletics Queensland, put a different version of the same point in the thread. "Maybe it requires a whole bunch of us to get in a room for a day and work out how it might be possible?" The answer is yes. The peak bodies that get this right will save their codes. The ones who don't will preside over a slow attrition of their affiliated club base, and they'll keep wondering why the next round of grants didn't fix it.

Where this all goes

Grants aren't the villain. The way grants have been used at community sport level — small, recurring, BAU-shaped — has produced a generation of clubs that are fragile in exactly the way Ames described. The shift required is uncomfortable for everyone involved. Councils have to fund differently. Peak bodies have to consolidate. Clubs have to build revenue muscle they let atrophy.

The clubs that do that work will end up running better facilities, employing real staff, and offering programmes their communities actually want. The clubs that don't will keep applying for the next round of hand sanitiser grants until the round stops coming.

The hard truth in that comment thread is the right one. It's just being said by the wrong people. It needs to come from the state bodies and the councils, the ones with the actual power to change the model. So far, mostly, it isn't.