16 May

On Saturday 14 May, it was my pleasure to attend an afternoon tea and information session for the volunteers that run Council’s community centres and community halls.

These are dedicated people doing unpaid work for our community, and I started thinking how we can help them, and how we can build better community centres into the future.

After listening to these volunteers, it became clear that our community centres - the community halls and neighbourhood centres – are still crucial to the health of our communities.  In fact, they are more important than ever.

People may flock to suburban shopping centres to meet their friends and to socialise, but shopping centres are private spaces, not public ones.  If we want to have a meeting as a local sports club, or have a fund raising function at a shopping centre, it is up to the private corporation that owns the shopping centre.

Community centres are still vitally important because they are our spaces.  You and I own them.  They are often controlled by a committee elected by community members, or controlled by a Council that you can elect.

Our community centres are the places where the community can meet to discuss and decide on important issues, and places that a community groups can have somewhere they can call “home”.

Yet community centres are becoming much more than public spaces where we can meet, discuss and decide things as a community.  They are becoming locations where community services are delivered.

State and federal government are increasingly granting money to community-based groups to deliver community services.  In my community of Deception Bay, there are organisations that are funded to educate young parents, provide training and employment services to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community, and to work with young people at need.  If these community groups did not do that, these things would simply not be done.

And where do they deliver these services?  At local houses they have to rent or buy.

The Deception Bay Neighbourhood Centre (DBNC) is a wonderful place where many State funded programs are delivered.  Queensland Health and the Department of communities run many programs out of DBNC.  DBNC itself also employs community workers to do counselling and help out people in need.

But it is too small.  Spaces and rooms at the DBNC are overcrowded and in high demand.  You could triple the size of the Centre, and it would still not accommodate all the groups and services desperate for space.

And this is where I am leading.  Local government needs to provide practical and modern community spaces that meet the needs of our community and our community groups.

Traditionally we have provided large spaces used for public meeting and dances, or for activities such as indoor bowls and judo classes.

But we need a whole system of smaller meeting rooms and office spaces where community organisations can meet young mums, or help kids caught up in the juvenile justice system.  We need professional offices for our local youth workers or counsellors.

The community centre volunteers at the afternoon tea last Saturday are on the “front line” of our community services.  They know the pressures in our local communities to have places where a whole range of organisations and services can meet, or can assist those who need our help.

They know that if our Council build new modern community centres that have a suite of offices, consulting rooms and meeting spaces, as well as a nice big hall space, that will be a great step towards building better communities.