Listening Tour: NSW and QLD
7 - 11 April
Our journey continued this week through 10+ diverse regions in NSW and Queensland, seeing the power of community-led collaboration in action. From integrated family hubs to food security and community resilience partnerships, each initiative emphasised the importance of trust, connection, and listening to lived experience - crucial ingredients to replicate successful place-based approaches.
Powerful Words That Stayed with Us:
"The funding available is for rebuilding bridges, not for rebuilding community"
“A community isn’t defined by a single voice but by the vibrant tapestry of many, where each perspective enriches and strengthens the whole."
"We're trying to support community to be its own change."
"We have a lot of services in the region, but we don't share information, we don't communicate and we don't organise."
“As always, the community will rise. Large institutions wait. But we don’t have time to wait.”
Our Journey Map:
NSW: Fairfield | Mount Druitt | Toormina | Kempsey | Taree | Byron Bay | Lismore | Murwillumbah | Chinderah | Tweed Heads | QLD: Brisbane | Gold Coast
Community Insight: What Works
We witnessed incredible innovation across initiatives including Karitane Fairfield Integrated Hub, Mounty Aboriginal Youth & Community Services: Just Reinvest NSW, Together in 2770: The Hive, Becoming U/Bongil Bongil Youth Collective, Learning the Macleay, Mid Coast 4 Kids, Micah Projects, Feeding QLD Kids Partnership (Foobank QLD, FoodShare & OzHarvest), the Northern Rivers Community Resilience Alliance and Ending Rough Sleeping Collaboration Byron Shire.
The successful approaches shared common elements:
Community members leading change in their own neighbourhoods
Soft entry points building trust and relationships
Cross-sector partnerships breaking down silos
Data-informed advocacy driving systems change
The role of place-based work in roles redesigning complex service systems
Throughout Week 3, we were reminded that place-based change isn't just about better service delivery - it's about shifting power, amplifying diverse voices, and recognising that communities already have the expertise to solve their challenges. That changing systems starts and ends with people.
At the Yuwa Nyinda Youth Summit in Kempsey, Jo Kelly (Partnership Lead for Learning the Macleay) posed: "You can either be a support or be a critic. The ladder is where we sit together, to improve things together."
Such reflections provide rich entry points for adaptive, local-first systems change reminding us to:
Work on the enabling conditions – like governance, trust, insurance, and visibility. These are the foundations that let communities rise and lead.
Build collective action – not by starting from scratch, but by weaving together what’s already working and removing the friction that holds it back.
Start small, think big – how a simple sausage sizzle can lead to a hub. How a single person can start a movement. Communities like Chinderah become a blueprint. All from a practical, grounded act of care.
Ultimately, this is about more than resilience. It’s about making care operational. It’s about designing systems that mirror the heart of the communities we serve - adaptive, generous, fiercely local.
And as a parting thought Sam Henderson (CEO, NRCF) shared, “the sustainability of community-based funding is uncertain, and government funding is often inaccessible due to complexity and scale mismatches. This is a systems-level challenge - a disconnect between who holds the power, and who holds the solutions.”