Mel Yuan for Brunswick

I’ve been involved in both successful and unsuccessful council Community Grants. Both times the experience has been bureaucratic, complex and slow. While accountability for public money is crucial, council needs to be more focused on how to facilitate community activity, not limit it, by wasting volunteers’ precious time. Hidden criteria and opaque decision-making reduce confidence in the system.

I’d like to see:

• more inclusive guidelines on projects that can be supported
• more flexible granting categories
• greater use of easier templates and checklists to support community projects
• Council assist and facilitate non-traditional fundraising activities, such as crowd funding
• Council assist and facilitate fundraising for unincorporated organisations (with the appropriate controls of course)

Volunteering Australia has some great facts and figures about the value and volume of volunteers.

Volunteers bring life, energy, authenticity and innovation to our communities.