I had a terrible night's sleep last night because I was so jacked up on adrenaline after the presentation of our community projects for Future Shapers that sleep was almost impossible. For the last four months, our Future Shaper cohort has broken into smaller groups and rallied around a common interest in the community they wanted to create impact in. Last night we all got to share the progress on our projects to each other, community stakeholders and members of the Committee for Ballarat.
There were five groups in total and the projects were as diverse and wonderful as the people who thought them up. We had one group create a podcast about empowering safer communities called PodSafe while another created a beautiful calendar that addresses food waste at home with each month featuring seasonal produce alongside recipes on how to use it, store it and ideas for left overs. One group implemented a pair to pair reading program for inmates at Langi Kal Kal prison that’s pilot program has already changed the lives of 10 participants. Another group wanted to connect Carer Card holders to local businesses only to discover that there was a more systemic problem at a government level and were able to take their research and present that back to the government to help improve future services.
I was part of the housing team ‘Together we Build’ that was looking at housing diversity in Ballarat. At the beginning of the community projects we’d been warned to pick a ‘crumb’ of an issue rather than trying to eat the whole cake but we couldn’t help ourselves. Well, I couldn’t. Given I was the co-founder of a prefab building company at the time, housing in Ballarat was something I was keen to learn more about. Ironically the majority of our project ended up being a research assignment as we tried to figure out who the stakeholders were when it came to the way we live in our city.
Being part of Future Shapers gives us privileged access to the leaders in our community that might not happen otherwise. We met with Regional Development Victoria, Economic Development at the Council alongside many of the planning and strategy team. While these conversations gave us great insights into the challenges around housing it was making our ability to create impact on such a complex issue (in 4 months) seem less and less achievable.
Luckily we linked up the team at the Council in charge of the Social and Affordable Housing Action Plan and basically asked them, how can we help? It turns out that not many people ask the council that so our interest was greatly received and we managed to find common ground in the promotion of Secondary Dwellings. To be a ‘Secondary Dwelling’ buildings have to be under 60m2, on the same lot as an existing home, have a kitchen, bathroom and toilet and anyone can live in it or it can be rented out.
We’d discovered early on that Ballarat has the unique problem of not having the right type of housing. Currently over 50% of the population is either a couple without kids or lives alone but only 20% of the housing stock is 3 bedrooms or less. Single people are living in three bedroom homes because there simply isn’t anything smaller available. Secondary Dwellings could help alleviate some of this stress through intergenerational living.
A Secondary Dwelling could be for grandparents to downsize (freeing up a 3-4 bedroom house potentially centrally located) and be close to family or it could be a great home for your young people who can’t afford to buy their first home. They don’t have to be occupied by family either so it could be a private rental property bringing in some extra income if you have the space. There are lots of ways that a Secondary Dwelling could benefit the community so the council is invested in promoting it.
We’d finally found our crumb and then the Council went into caretaker mode for 6 weeks and were unable to do anything! Talk about timing. This did however give us space to put together a white paper on how to build a Secondary Dwelling and think of some interesting ways to promote them. The coolest idea by far was to have 100% scale floor plans in public areas showing people how big 60m2 actually is. We discovered in our research that people think of granny flats as a one room box but 60m2 is easily a livable space for 2 people.
We thought malls would be a good place to get engagement but 60m2 of advertising real estate leading up to Christmas would be far outside our budget so we had to rethink our plan. On Monday we finally got back in touch with the council who suggested that we turn our white paper into an opinion piece and link it into an event they'll be hosting early next year. This was a fabulous outcome and came just in the nick of time. We finally had something positive to present other than all the lessons we’d learnt about trying to eat the whole cake.
I spoke to one of my teammates after the presentations were finished and he summed it up perfectly. Instead of being nervous that we hadn’t achieved the outcomes we’d set out to and presenting that to a room of community stakeholders, he was excited for everyone else's project. Every single one of our Future Shapers buddies got up there and smashed it out of the park. We watched as people who feared public speaking at the start of the year, commanded the attention of every single person in the room. People who have turned a spark into a program that will fundamentally change inmates' lives. Quiet people tell big stories and accomplish things they never thought themselves capable of doing.
This is community leadership at its best. It's not about you as the individual, it’s about everybody else. Watching each group get up and share their project was awesome. By the time it came to us, we were last, it felt almost irrelevant what our outcome had been. It was simply a privilege to be able to share the stage with such great people.
The buzz at the after party was electric as the Future Shapers moved though the crowd spreading the good vibes of collectively achieving something together. I can see why the alumni are so strong for this leadership program. You really feel like you're part of something special. Community leadership programs like this are hard to do well and the Committee for Ballarat led by Adele Nairn and her ‘small but mighty’ team have done an amazing job of curating a course that can inspire so much growth! If you’re interested, I strongly recommend you apply or talk to your work place about sponsoring you.
