Funding for scientific research projects with a national impact that engage the public as citizen scientists

We can only accept applications where you can provide both of the following:

• Evidence from your board (or chief executive officer or equivalent if there is no board) that the project is supported (lead organisations can submit a maximum of one application per grant opportunity round).
• Evidence of how you will provide your share of project costs (including 15% of eligible expenditure and any other project costs not covered by the grant) such as a CFO or an accountant declaration that confirms you can fund your share of the project costs, including any ineligible expenditure. An accountant declaration template is available on business.gov.au and GrantConnect. If you don't use this template, you must include equivalent information and the declaration in your own document.

You are not eligible to apply as a lead applicant if you are:

• an individual
• a Commonwealth or state/territory agency or body that does not undertake publicly funded research
• a non-corporate Commonwealth entity
• a trust (however, an incorporated trustee may apply on behalf of a trust)

We assess your application against the eligibility criteria and then against the assessment criteria. Only eligible applications will proceed to the assessment stage.

The amount of detail and supporting evidence you provide in your application should be relative to the project size, complexity and grant amount requested. You should define, quantify and provide evidence to support your answers. The sample application form displays character limits.

We refer your application to the Citizen Science Grants Round 2 Committee (Committee). The Committee will assess your application against the assessment criteria and compare it to other eligible applications in a funding round before recommending which projects to fund.

In order to support a spread of projects across Australia within a variety of scientific fields/disciplines, the Committee will take into account the geographic location of the projects as well as the project subject matter in its assessment. This ensures that successful projects will have a national reach in diverse scientific fields.

The program delegate will make the final decision.

We will only consider funding applications that score at least 50% against each assessment criterion, as these represent best value for money.

• Assessment criterion 1 - The reach and impact of the project (60 points)
• Assessment criterion 2 - Sound project design and implementation (20 points)
• Assessment criterion 3 - Skills, capacity, capability and resources to deliver the project (20 points)

If your application is successful, you’ll receive a written offer. If you are unsuccessful, we’ll notify you in writing and give you the chance to discuss the outcome with us.

Successful applicants must enter into a grant agreement with the Commonwealth. The grant agreement will specify the reporting requirements, payment schedule and milestones necessary to receive payments.

We’ll make the first payment when the grant agreement is executed. We’ll make subsequent payments after we have received and accepted the required report.

Payments will be made by direct credit into a nominated bank account.