Zoe Malone tells her Ag story

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Zoe Malone has lived in Darwin for more than a decade and has spent most of her life in rural and regional Australia. She is passionate about the role people and communities play in creating strong and vibrant regions. Zoe recently completed the Australian Rural Leadership Program and reconnected with the shared challenges facing communities across Australia.

Zoe grew up in regional Victoria where her family had a strong involvement as volunteers in many grassroots organisations which helped support and enrich their local community. Having been involved with grassroots and volunteer organisations from a young age, she is passionate about the important role volunteers play in connecting people in regional communities.

Zoe recognised that many grassroots community groups struggle to keep up with increasing governance and accountability demands, putting pressure on a decreasing pool of volunteers. For her Rural Women's Award project, Zoe will work with community groups to produce a suite of useful resources to support better-informed decisions about governance, streamlining requirements and connecting them to useful tools and information. These resources can be shared with and used by volunteer and community groups across regional Australia.

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By simplifying the process and time spent on governance, volunteers can spend more time on the things that make a difference to in their community; and the reason they volunteered in the first place.

While there are already lots of governance resources available, Zoe feels that most of these take a top down approach and focus on larger organisations with paid staff and those with significant risks and responsibilities – leaving a gap in the support available for grassroots community groups.

In bringing her project to life, Zoe will initially seek feedback from a diverse range of community groups and volunteers to understand the current needs and range of circumstances and will engage with governance experts to explore solutions, test different ideas and start developing resources.

The toolkit may involve a checklist, prompt questions, support tools, templates and guides to help identify governance priorities and support in becoming a stronger organisation. These tools will then be tested with a broader range of community groups to investigate whether they can be applied across different contexts and offer real value to volunteers in addressing their challenges.

The materials will then be refined and made available online and for volunteers and organisations to share through their networks.

https://www.agrifutures.com.au/

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