A long-form version of this document is available on request for foundation trustees and individual philanthropists considering a gift of $25,000 or more. Contact [email protected].
Every year, hundreds of thousands of Australians receive a diagnosis of terminal, life-limiting, chronic or serious illness. A substantial proportion of them are also carrying consumer debt at the moment of diagnosis: credit cards, personal loans, BNPL balances, buy-now-pay-later stacked across three or four apps, energy and telco arrears, informal debt to family and small lenders. In the months and years that follow, this debt does not go away. It grows. Collections continue. Default judgments are entered. Credit files are damaged. Family relationships strain around who pays for what. The person at the centre of it — who should be spending their time on treatment, on the people they love, on end-of-life planning — is spending it on hold to collections agents.
There is no institutional safety net for this exact intersection. Financial counsellors are magnificent but chronically under-resourced. Hardship teams inside banks vary widely in quality. Palliative-care social workers do their best but rarely have the time, mandate, or training to negotiate directly with a creditor. The gap in the market is not "help with debt" or "help with illness"; it is help with debt because of illness, delivered with the pace and dignity that illness demands.
Life Without Debt is a proposed Australian public benevolent institution designed to fit that gap and no other. Its beneficiary class, defined in constitution clause 4(a), is persons in Australia living with terminal, life-limiting, chronic or serious illness — plus their immediate families and primary carers. Its service is casework: an intake conversation, a full picture of the person's consumer debt, a plan that is documented and consented to, and then direct negotiation with creditors on the person's behalf until the debt is resolved. Free at the point of use. No repayment.
The model is not novel. It is a synthesis of adjacent Australian and international models — financial counselling, medico-legal partnerships, palliative-care social work, patient-advocacy charities in cancer and MND — recombined into a single dedicated service.
The charity will operate under ACNC Governance Standards, ASIC company-limited-by-guarantee rules, and the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission Act 2012. The board is being assembled with intentional skills coverage across finance, law, palliative care, lived experience, and technology. Whistleblower policy, complaints handling, and conflicts-of-interest policy are published or in HA1 draft (see /complaints, /board-and-governance). Financial statements will be audited from year one and published in full.
The principal foreseeable risks — reputational risk from a beneficiary complaint, legal risk from a creditor challenge, and mission drift under funding pressure — are addressed respectively by the Beneficiary Depiction Guardrails (which prevent us from ever putting a beneficiary on the front of an appeal without their consent), by the requirement that all casework be delivered under formal supervision by a legally trained lead, and by a Board-adopted mission statement that constrains how funding may be deployed.
A major gift — a gift of $25,000 or more, or a multi-year pledge — buys the charity the thing it needs most in its first three years: the ability to commit to beneficiaries and to staff. Without major gifts, LWD would be a project. With them, it becomes an institution with a runway. Foundational gifts of $100,000 or more will be recognised in the charity's foundational-supporters list — anonymously if you prefer, and on terms you approve.
To discuss a major gift, please write to [email protected]. The initial conversation will be led personally by the co-founder or by a nominated director. Long-form printable version (8-12 pages · PDF) will be provisioned in Sprint 37.
Major-donor correspondence is protected under our Privacy Policy, with additional confidentiality provisions available on request. Complaints or concerns can be raised via /complaints.
Version 0.1 · HA1 draft · Sprint 36. Related: Grants pipeline · Corporate partnership · Gift in your will · Impact reporting · Board & Governance.