Celebrating National Volunteer Week: Scullin Community Group

posted in Uncategorized

To celebrate all the people who volunteer their time to help across the country, we spoke to some of the not-for-profit organisations around Australia who rely on volunteers to make a world of difference.

Today we speak to Sue from the Scullin Community Group, which was formed by local residents to give the neighbourhood a more vibrant retail area and better shopping experience.

Why was the Scullin Community Group started?

The Scullin Community Group was started in October 2018 by local residents and neighbours. As a community, we loved our suburb, which is 20 minutes from Canberra’s CBD, but knew there was potential to become more connected with other locals. We also knew we weren’t the only ones concerned with the dire state of the shops. The group decided to do something about it, and the Scullin Community Group was born.

Things moved fast. Within weeks, we set up a Facebook group, organised the community group’s first get together, and joined with other locals – the Southern Cross Early Childhood School, local businesses, government representatives and other interested community groups – to start changing Scullin for the better.

What is the group’s mission?

The Scullin Traders is a community entrepreneurship hub run by the Scullin Community Group. As a key part of the community’s efforts to transform the vibe of the struggling Scullin shops, the space features comfy couches for coffee drinkers, handmade products from Canberra microbusinesses, and coworking space and creative workshops for the Canberra community.

How many volunteers do you rely on at the moment?

The space is run entirely by volunteers and was supported by a donation from the ACT Chief Minister’s fund. About 50 people have already put in the time for this project. There’s a core volunteer team of about a dozen, but that’s growing every day. While we aim to help our micro traders make a profit (we want small businesses to succeed!) any profits made by the Scullin Community Group will be fed back into supporting our mission to change the shops, and give residents a place to be proud of and to share with others. We’re an incorporated association and about to register with the ACNC for charity status.

Why do you need volunteers to help your NFP?

This is a community-driven project where people power is changing our struggling local shops. Part of the beauty of the project is that people from all across our region – not just our suburb, but the neighbouring suburbs and further across Canberra – are excited and empowered by its potential. Because we’re documenting the entire project on our Patreon page we feel like there’s scope for it to become a model that could be rolled out by other communities across the country.

If you had more volunteers what would you do with them?

Scale up! We’d ramp up our creative workshop program as we believe it has the power to help us become financially sustainable and turn our suburb into being known as a creative hub. We’d also have the shop open longer hours, and we’d probably start eyeing off some of the other local spaces. A weekly local market is also in our sights: more volunteers could help that become a reality.

What is the most memorable moment volunteer you’ve had?

There are so many! Today’s was the one who, when given a shopping list of what we needed to buy for the shop said, “I don’t need money. I’ve been meaning to donate and I haven’t yet, so I’d really just like to pay for all of this.”

It could just as easily be the volunteer who was down at the centre at 8am today blasting the tiles with a pressure sprayer to give them a clean ahead of our launch in 48 hours.

Or the mum who was excited about the chance to volunteer in the shop to build her confidence for being back in the workforce. Every single day we have multitudes of these stories – I can give you dozens more if you like!

If you’d like to help the Scullin Community Group, follow them on Facebook. For more information on how Xero supports volunteers and not-for-profits, check out the Xero non-profits web page.

The post Celebrating National Volunteer Week: Scullin Community Group appeared first on Xero Blog.