Neighbourhood houses in need of funding

FOR forty years this June, Long Gully Neighbourhood house has provided service to the surrounding community.

As a way of marking the anniversary a celebration is being planned and staff and volunteers are compiling a book to tell the story of the centre’s history.

Kerry Parry, the coordinator at Long Gully Neighbourhood centre said it was interesting to see how during the last 40 years the organisation had run off the smell of an oily rag.

“Not much has changed,” Ms Parry said. “Our funding from the department really only covers my role, nothing else.”

The Long Gully neighbourhood house receives some financial support from the City of Greater Bendigo, which supports employment of their community garden facilitator up to 13 hours per week and a community development worker for 20 hours per week.

Neighbourhood houses often operate outside of standard business hours, with activities and support services available to the community in the evenings and on weekends.

“We’ve got a strong volunteer base of about 40 volunteers between the neighbourhood centre and the garden, but really without our volunteers I don’t know what we would do,” Ms Parry said.

In recent years, Long Gully has introduced services such as the Chatty Café to foster social connection, and information sessions to help community members understand changes to local policies like the introduction of organics bins by the City of Greater Bendigo.

“For us it’s about seeing what the needs are in our local community and doing what we can without a great deal of funding, and the more funding we have the more we can do,” she said.

“But at this stage I don’t think there’d be a single community house to say ‘we’re sitting high and dry and don’t need any funding’.”

To remedy the operating cash short-fall Neighbourhood Houses Victoria has applied to the Victorian State Government for an additional $2.5 million in funding, which Ms Parry said she hopes would be recurrent.

“We hope it would join the recurrent funding for neighbourhood houses, but again they’ve had to lobby for that over the years as well,” Ms Parry said.

More reliable funding for neighbourhood houses, according to Ms Parry, would mean less time and resources needed for continual grant applications, and would broaden the scope of what the organisation could achieve.

“The potential is there to do so much more, but we just don’t have the funds of the staff to do it,” she said.