Community health and climate champion nominated for Zonta honour

THERE was a spill of home-grown tomatoes, freshly picked and still warm, on Robyn Reeves’ kitchen bench.

Sitting in her small back yard, abundant with rhubarb, black Russian tomatoes, amaranth plants, olive, lemon and lime trees, Mrs Reeves said she was really surprised and honoured to be nominated for Ballarat Zonta Club’s 2019 Honour Roll of Ballarat’s Great Women.

Mrs Reeves, recently retired CEO of Ballarat Community Health, is described as a campaigner for the disadvantaged, delivering better health care for the whole community “I am keen on the idea of making a difference in people’s lives by helping them develop the capacity to make their own decisions,” said Mrs Reeves.

Bryan Crebbin, BCH Chairperson, when nominating Mrs Reeves for the honour said, “Her strengths have been to grow Ballarat Community Health at a rapid rate over a very diverse number of areas, always focused on helping the needy and disadvantaged in our community.

“BCH was not in a good way when Robyn took on the role of CEO, so she set about reversing that status from the day she started.

“She was determined to not let it fail but to turn it into a success, she wanted to achieve the best possible for the community.”

When Mrs Reeves took on the role at BCH turnover was $3 million when she left 13 years later it was $20 million.

There were 45 staff on the payroll when she started and around 230 employees in 2018.

During this time Mrs Reeves achieved an average 10 per cent growth over her 13 years as CEO.

“When I first went to BCH there were a huge number of gaps in community services and support,” Mrs Reeves said.

“I remember thinking I feel a bit of a fraud, I’ve worked in aged care and social work and I don’t know anything about alcohol and drug treatments and yet that is one of our main services.

“But I had good training and knew how to find out the information I needed and I was also able to work closely with the staff who did have the knowledge.

“A lot of the work was empowering people to be the best they could.”

Mrs Reeves said she has always had fervid interests in what is happening in the environment and with climate change.

“I think I now have an opportunity to concentrate on that more.”

Back in the late 70s and early 80s she was an avid reader of Grass Roots magazine, there is still a pile of them in her garage.

“It taught you how to look after goats one week then how to make cheese the next week,” she said.

She and her husband Frank, built a mudbrick house on 40 acres of land in Avoca around that time, sowing a pea crop that only partially grew and with fences that weren’t too good so the sheep got out a lot.

Mr and Mrs Reeves and their first-born son lived off the land independently, running the house on a wind generator and keeping bee hives.

“After five years we realised if we wanted to afford a holiday or anything more than subsistence living, we probably needed a job.”

Now she regularly delivers surplus food from her household vegie garden to the Food is Free laneway.