Anne is the co-chair of the Eurobodalla Community Investment Committee on NSW’s south coast. Eurobodalla CIC is focusing on the major local industry aged care, and how to create quality career pathways for young people who want to stay in their regional area. The CIC is coordinated by lead partners: Campbell Page and Eurobodalla Shire Council. I sat down with Anne to pick her brain about the diversity of her local area, how they’re engaging young people to find solutions to aged care sector’s business problems, the value of the ‘brains trust’ across the NYEB, and at what point in your career you learn that vanilla is actually a flavour when making milkshakes.
Read the full interview below.
So tell me about what you do with the NYEB.
I co-chair our CIC with Rhonnie [from the Shire Council]. We have been peers in our sector for many years. We’ve always known and respected one another and got really excited about an opportunity to work together.
I look at the principles behind things – ‘Are we looking at the cause and effect, are we looking at symptoms or the structure?’
In our partnership, I’m the ruminator and Rhonnie is the doer – she’s a thinker, too – she’s very good at going ‘and this is how we’re gonna get it done!’
We’ve put an hour aside every fortnight, and we plan together. Rhonnie prefers not to chair meetings, I don’t mind doing that. She has strong connections to the labour market because she has run a training organisation before, so she knows everybody. So we plan together, and then we work within our skill sets.
Why did you get involved in the NYEB?
We’ve [Campbell Page] got lots and lots of youth programs including the only youth homelessness contract. The reason I’m involved in our CIC is that one of the most significant structural barriers to leaving homelessness is unemployment.
And one of the greatest protective factors from re-entering homelessness is employment. So that’s why I was really keen to put my hand up and go “Let’s have a CIC,” we need to make sure that young people have a very clear pathway out of homelessness.
The local businesses need access to good quality people who want to live and stay in their community. We’ve got a labour mismatch that realistically, we should be able to fix.
What was your first job?
My first job was at the shop across the road from my primary school. I think they gave me the job because they knew my mum and dad. I used to give the kids more lollies than their 5c could buy, and I didn’t really think about the cost of that or the business’s bottom line. I also got to make milkshakes, but I didn’t know that vanilla was a flavour. So, if you ordered a vanilla milkshake, particularly if you didn’t have ice cream, you just got frothy milk. Really speaks to the importance of onboarding, doesn’t it?
How did you get from there to here?
I moved from Eden to study in Canberra – that was the big smoke to me. Then I worked in legal firms for a little while and even then, with a degree under my belt, I didn’t have the practical know-how and did some really silly things that I didn’t know were silly until I knew more about it. That assumed knowledge issue – again!
I found that studying law was fascinating, but working in law was actually very dull and repetitive. And at that time, they were still building Parliament House, so I landed myself a job as a contract manager where I was one of a team who worked between the Italian film of architects and the local construction.
And it was wonderful because we worked with industry. Because even our manufacturers didn’t have the scale to manufacture the sort of thing that was needed, so that there was this huge capacity building program for the construction and manufacturing industry in order to be able to build Parliament House.
Then I moved to the coast and for 10 years I was working way too many jobs. So, in order to scratch enough income together I was working part-time for a conference centre where I would do their events organising. And then I would need more work, so I would do bar and service work. And I still needed more work, so I did two days a week bookkeeping for a stock and station agent. No one gave me enough hours to [reach the threshold to] pay superannuation. Structurally that’s a big issue in the country. When you’re stitching multiple jobs together, you are not accruing enough wealth for your future well-being.
That went on for ten years until I ended up in my not-for-profit job that I’ve had for the last 25 years.
What’s unique about your region?
So in terms of geography, it’s not it’s not a very big area. It’s made up of three major towns and each of them has a completely different personality and culture. They all have different origin industries – one was a fishing town, one was a holiday town, one was agricultural. So in some towns everyone knows everyone and you’ve got five generations, in others people have moved there more recently.
You look at our economy. We have a retiring, ageing population. And a lot of that is coming from the fact that we are the [closest] coastal district from Canberra. Further north is very built up and expensive now, so we are the sea change location these days. We have a wonderful aged care industry that’s building around it.
Being a beach town with holiday houses, we used to have a very split economy but that is improving. The housing prices were quite high and your local wages were quite low. Now that state and federal government departments have moved some functions to our area, not just service delivery, that’s levelled out the seasonality of employment. So that has been good for evening out the incomes because it sets a different benchmark – competing against government wages, which is good for a country town. That’s a strength.
What are you and your CIC working on right now?
We’re working with a wonderful organisation that does leadership and entrepreneurship workshops to run some co-design workshops with local young people in high schools.
We are working with the aged care industry to identify and articulate some business challenges that they experience so that young people can work together to come up with solutions for it. We’re doing that as a first stage introduction to aged care as a pathway to many quality careers in the local community.
I think it will be lovely. It means that employer representatives are going to spend an hour and a half with groups of six young people, talking to them, giving them context, and forming relationships. Then the young people will go off and work on things and at the end, the conversation flips, where the young people are leading the conversation back to the employer.
So you’ve got this transition of insight back from young people to the employer.
It’s really interesting because we’re trying to not to fall into the trap of the models that already exist. If the models are that already exist worked, we wouldn’t be doing the work that we’re doing. So we’re trying to think hard and challenge our thinking around all things, but we’ve also got a very broad brains trust of other CICs who have done smart stuff and have already grappled with the sort of problems that we are and tried a bunch of solutions.
We’ve actually got a lot of solutions within the [NYEB] network. The more relationships we create across the NYEB, the more knowledge, expertise and practice knowledge we can apply.
I find myself thinking about this complex dynamic, I go off to a Community of Practice and go ‘oh man, that group over there are 12 months more advanced in their thinking, they’re thinking and worrying about the same things as us,’ but they have had three goes at this, they know stuff.
What have you learnt or what has changed for you since being involved in your CIC or the NYEB?
Maybe I knew this, but… changing status quo takes some real heavy lifting. And we need to not underestimate the length of time it takes.
If you try quick solutions, you’re probably going to get the result you deserve. I think you have to do some really good listening and learning before you start redesigning.
If you’ve done that listening and learning in advance, your design should come closer to envisioning a solution.
You’re still going to design with error, and you’re going to have to adjust. I look at it and ‘go oh my God, it’s taken us a long time’ and then I think, ‘if we went faster, we’d probably fail, because we wouldn’t have known what we know.’ I think we’re gaining a lot of insight along the line.