Albury-Wodonga District Get-together
Albury-Wodonga District Get-together
Community groups gathering to build strong cross-group communication
Local Links - Stronger Communities -
LLCI021-009
The issue
There are many volunteer community groups doing great things in and around Albury-Wodonga with a nature, sustainability and agriculture focus. They are very busy beetling away at their passion projects, achieving excellent results, chasing elusive funding dollars and finding the time around competing demands like work, family and Netflix.
Whilst Local Landcare Co-ordinators interact with many of these groups, there just never seems enough time for the groups to interact with each other as groups, rather than as individuals.
The solution
With funding from Murray Local Land Services, the Murray Landcare Collective and Petaurus Education Group's Local Landcare Co-ordinator, hosted a district get-together in November 2018.
The purpose was to provide the opportunity for nature loving volunteer community groups to mingle, share their projects and what keeps them enthusiastic and build relationships across the district. Local councils, Local Land Services and other government NRM agencies were also invited as participants, not as respondents. The type of groups included landcare, Friends of…., sustainability, field naturalists, bush walking, community gardens & native plants, environment, sustainable/holistic/regenerative/production agriculture and farming, climate-change, biodiversity and natural resource management.
The impact
The early evening social gathering at The Sustainability Activity Centre on Gateway Island attracted representatives from 24 sperate community groups. There were a further 11 groups that sent apologies and said they would be interested in future events. There was no agenda, no evaluations, no 'learnings' and no hustling; there was good food, a party atmosphere and easy flowing conversation. As one attendee said "we don’t often have a chance to say hello to each other, put faces to names or swap ideas".
Although the event were effectively a pilot to assess the value of this level of engagement with groups, the feedback received suggests they would be a worthwhile exercise in the future to maintain local networks and engage groups in their wider regional context.
Key facts
- 35 groups responded
- 67 individuals engaged
- share & interact
- who is who and doing what?