By the Convenor, Louis Taborda, from Bulletin 8 of 2023 (October)

After one year as Convenor of the Community Development Subcommittee, I’m afraid my report card is not looking very good. I came in with a lot of optimism and as someone who is a project manager and teaches that subject, I want to be measured by the value I create for the Glebe community. Alas, while there has been lots of activity – see the Bulletin 2023/04 report – the results are thin on the ground. So, necessarily, this report must be one of identifying the learnings and making changes to improve things next year.

We have done a few things right though. We started the year well when I organised a workshop to collect and review the different initiatives that represent what ‘community development’ means to the Glebe Society. We got a good list of ideas that would be useful and even though we commenced many of them with the help of my University of Sydney project management students, I would have wished there was more to show for it at the end of the year.

We are hoping to end the year on a high by running a little experiment (an online fundraising auction) to support the good work done by Centipede, an out of school hours care program  operating at Glebe Public School – an important service that the Society has supported over the years. An excerpt from the advertising brochure created by the student team running the project is shown, and the details are still to be finalised. What we ask is that Glebe Society members participate in the online auction (the details will be posted on our website) by donating useful goods and services to start, and then bidding for the submitted items that will be available on the auction website. There will be more information posted on the Glebe Society website as the auction takes shape with the goal of raising funds for Centipede in the lead up to Christmas.

 

This initiative aside, what I have learnt this year is that having the student resources available is not enough to get ideas off the ground. Community development initiatives need to be guided by local folk who are committed in seeing the initiative come to fruition – the enthusiasm and drive needs to come from the community itself. No matter how good the idea seems to me to be or to the Glebe Society management committee, there needs to be more grassroots involvement so that we can make these ideas a reality.

Finally, the big change I hope to make in 2024 is to actually act as a convenor and revive the Community Development Subcommittee. If you are a Glebe Society member interested in making a positive impact for residents of Glebe, please do consider joining us next year so we can do good things that involve and touch more of our local community.