From October 16 to 18, 2019 the Dumbleyung CRC coordinator Alison Gray and trainee Ella Grundy were fortunate to attend the annual Linkwest conference with fellow CRC’s and Community Neighbourhood Centres (our metro equivalent). The conference is always a great opportunity to network with others, learn how we are tracking as a network (and from the stats we’re pretty stoked!), hear from inspiring key-note speakers and attend workshops that will help us to be the best community hub we can be!
Over the three days we attended seven different workshops from how to succeed in social media, Jobs Australia workshops, social enterprise development and participating in Open Space discussions. Always a great learning experience, we were grateful to have won a free place at the conference and have our trainee Ella attend. A very new experience for our trainee, Ella shares her experience of the conference below.
A trainee’s perspective, by Ella Grundy
I recently attended a three day conference earlier this month from October 16 to 18 at Pan Pacific Hotel in Perth. Hosted by Linkwest the conference theme was P3 – People, Place and Partnerships.
One of the workshops I attended was ‘Committees unpacked’. The workshop was very interesting it was about using effective leadership skills in your community and for your volunteers.
I particularly enjoyed the workshop ‘How to succeed in social media’ presented by Anna Hill of Hancock Creative. Social media plays an important part in any business and I gained great insight to posting content which encourages greater engagement with a target audience. The workshop also showed a PowerPoint on how to navigate Facebook and view your business/organisations insights and/or statistics. Social media can help to educate, promote and gain more interest in your business/organisation.
I enjoyed meeting other people from other Community Resource Centre’s and Neighbourhood Centres. It was a great way to discuss and relay how other centres run and bounce ideas off each other to benefit the whole community resource centre network.
Overall, the conference was inspiring, interesting and informative! We had the ability to meet with key funding body the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) and learn how we are tracking as a network and also what our future funding may look like! So what does the glass ball of future funding look like?
We’ve been fortunate to have received a two year extension on our current contract which will take us to June 2022. Past this date? A proposed tender for a five year contract which would take us from 2022 til 2027 – very exciting! So whilst we wait to see what the tender may look like the CRC network will be actively engaging with DPIRD to provide key information on how we move forward and deliver needed community workshops, events and services to regional WA!
We couldn’t fit all of the below into the article but here’s some other awesome and fun facts about the CRC and Neighbourhood Centre (NC) network!
- There are more CRC’s and NC’s in Australia then there are McDonalds (+1000 centres vs. 970 McDonalds)
- CRC’s have provided Video Conferencing services to 2222 people (October 2017-June 2019)
- CRC’s and NC’s provide employment to more than 750 people
- CRC’s and NC’s host over 1000 community groups and services each week
- 56% of centres are located in rural and regional communities (populations below 3,000)
- In total around 1200 people volunteer on the management committees of CRC’s and NC’s
- There are approximately 80 trainees employed across the network with CRC’s employing approximately 75 of these.