Our Story

Our Focus

The Fairley Foundation is a place-based funder, focused on supporting programs in Greater Shepparton. We empower grassroots community programs that contribute to making Greater Shepparton more liveable, culturally rich, educationally successful and supportive of diversity.

The Foundation provides advocacy and financial support for innovative programs that enhance access to education, culture and the arts, resulting in:

more children and young people engaged in education and / or work;
a thriving arts and creative community with broad access to inspirational music and dance education;
events that enhance liveability and celebrate creativity, such as the Shepparton Festival
intercultural understanding and greater tolerance of difference; and
recognition of the culture and talents of our Indigenous communities.

Our grants program supports initiatives within these aspirations.

Our History

Since 1965

As one of the Founders and subsequently Managing Director of Shepparton Preserving Company Ltd (SPC), Sir Andrew created what by the mid-1960’s was the largest fruit canning complex in the Southern Hemisphere. He was equally committed to the civic prosperity of Shepparton and its governance. He became the first Mayor of Shepparton in 1927, and the first Mayor of the City of Greater Shepparton in 1948.

In creating the Sir Andrew and Lady Foundation, he specified that the Foundation should principally be for the benefit of people and communities of the Greater Shepparton area.

Over nearly 60 years, the Foundation has been recognised as a trusted voice in the Shepparton community, influential in many areas of local life, including through the establishment of the Greater Shepparton Foundation. It has played an important role in enhancing outcomes in education, employment, the arts, health, sport, cultural diversity and social justice.

Inspiring Leaders

Since 1997

The Fairley Leadership Program, established by the Fairley Foundation in 1997, has been one of the most successful regional leadership development programs in Australia.

Carefully designed to develop and maximise an individual’s capacity for community leadership, the year-long Program offers opportunities for local leaders from all walks of life within the Goulburn Murray region to build their skills, knowledge, resilience and capacity as leaders.

The Program provides a mix of learning environments, encouraging the development of a vigorous network of community leaders in a model which has been replicated many times since it was established, across Australia and the Pacific.

An evaluation found that Fairley Leadership Program alumni were more likely than other members of the community to take on roles in school boards, council, as well as commercial and government leadership.

Established with funding from the Fairley Foundation, the Program is now run by Goulburn Murray Community Leadership. The Fairley Foundation continues to show a strong interest in the progress of participants and trustees have endorsed continued use of the Fairley name for the Program.

Founder and Philanthropist

Sir Andrew Fairley (1884-1965) was a prominent Victorian business figure and respected civic leader in Shepparton for much of his long life. Andrew Walker Fairley arrived in Shepparton as a small child in 1884, after his parents immigrated to Australia from Grangemouth in Scotland with their six young sons. After completing his schooling in Devonport, Tasmania, he joined the family business, Fairley’s emporium in Shepparton and later established a profitable rural and real estate partnership with his brother John Frederick (Fred). An active sportsman, he was a keen shooter, early motoring enthusiast and talented lawn bowls player.

At the age of 37 Fairley joined the board of the struggling cannery then known as the Shepparton Fruit Preserving Company (SPC). A few years later, having been appointed chairman and managing director, Andrew Fairley said he would make the rescue and development of the business his life’s work. And that is what he did. At the helm of SPC he displayed rare gifts in finance and marketing and showed particular concern for employees in every part of the cannery. Many of them were left a generous personal legacy in his will.

When he was knighted in 1951 Sir Andrew was recognised as one of the world’s leading experts in fruit canning and a major figure in Australian primary industry. By the time he died at the age of 81 – and still serving as the company’s leader – he had turned a modest factory in a weatherboard shed into a cannery with an international reputation; the SPC brand was familiar around the world.

Sir Andrew travelled extensively on behalf of SPC and the Australian fruit canning industry. He was also a long serving Commissioner of Victoria’s State Electricity Commission (SEC). For more than 30 years Sir Andrew was married to Neta (formerly Mineta Stewart) and as the couple had no children, the bulk of his considerable estate was used to establish the Fairley Foundation, to assist the people of Shepparton and the Goulburn Valley.

Sir Andrew also played a major role in the development of his adopted hometown and was the first Mayor of the Borough of Shepparton and the first Mayor of the City of Shepparton. After his death, a gallery space in the Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) at its former site, was named after him in recognition of his significant contribution to the development and housing of Shepparton’s art collection. His portrait, by the late Sir William Dargie, hangs in the Museum.