From little things, big things grow

Above Sally Bailey’s desk in Mount Gambier’s Stand Like Stone Foundation (SLSF) office, a star-shaped note is pinned. ‘To Sally,’ the note reads, ‘thanks for supporting Youth Opportunities. Without you, this program would not be the way it is. From Kaitlin’.

For Sally, the deliverer of good news to hundreds of people and community groups in her 14 years as the foundation’s Grants Coordinator, the student’s note is a touching reminder of the many lives the foundation has touched since the very first grant was awarded back in 2006.

This year, the foundation celebrates ‘20 years of Giving Back’ to the Limestone Coast community, with a storytelling project celebrating the foundation’s collective impact.

Over the last 20 years, more than $2.3 million has been awarded across the Limestone Coast in community grants, scholarships and program support.

A total of 44 sub-funds have been created, flowing into communities and projects, big and small, across the region. No less than seventeen times, The Barn ballroom has entertained the dancing dreams of locals through the hugely popular Swinging with the Stars event, while raising hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Behind the big events and headlines, it’s the personal stories that resonate with the many people who have given their time to the Stand Like Stone team over the years.

Delivered to the right person at the right time, a $50 voucher is just as valuable as a $10k grant, explains SLSF Patron Sue Charlton AM, who chaired the foundation for more than 10-years.

Sue’s own mindset was changed in the foundation’s early days, when the national Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal (FRRR) asked if SLSF wanted to help distribute their popular Back-to-School vouchers.

Given to schools to pass onto local families in need, Sue initially believed the $50 value was too small to have any lasting consequences, however a letter from one recipient changed her mind.

“I remember a letter from one grandmother who was raising her grandchildren, but the youngest one wouldn’t go to school because he didn’t have any shoes,” Sue said. “Again and again, she tried her best to get him to go, but he would run away and be home before she was.

“When she got the voucher, she bought him a pair of shoes and he never missed another day of school.”

The story was to create its own ripple effect.

When Sue spoke at an event, a local businessman was so moved by the story he rang the headmaster of the school and said any child who needed a pair of shoes were to go down and put them on his account.

“A $50 voucher changed his life,” Sue said, simply. “I just love that story.”

Back in the early 2000s, it was a highly motivated group of Limestone Coast locals fed up with seeing local donations head out of the region, including Sue and the late Brian Page and Tom Rymill, who led the charge to form a new community foundation.

The objective of the new foundation would be simple, based on a much-quoted line, to ‘give where you live’.

Unique to other local organisations, the foundation’s finances would rely on a ‘corpus’, or pool of money with the income earned given back to the region through grants and scholarships.

In their start-up phase, the group had to overcome a number of issues, including a minefield of legalities and finding a representative board, however the biggest proved tackling the region’s attitude around traditional fundraising.

“We have a very, very generous community and if you look for money for a worthwhile cause, you will find it,” Sue said.

“But they couldn’t understand why we didn’t want to spend their money! The corpus model took a lot of explaining.”

In the end, Sue found the best explainer in her own backyard, through a beautiful Dianthus flowering plant, which her mother had brought from her own garden at Stirling.

Presenting each of the 30-plus committee members with a potted plant, which was a small cutting from the original Dianthus, Sue explained the plant was ‘a symbol of what the foundation could become’, by gifting onwards whilst the original plant (or donation) still remained.

It worked a treat. “A lot of those people still have those plants in their garden,” Sue smiles.

As for a name for their fledgling foundation, opinions flew thick and fast, said Sue, crediting Tom Rymill with the idea of utilising one of the region’s most famous creatives – Adam Lindsay Gordon – as inspiration.

Embracing the objectives of the group, lines from Gordon’s poem Ye Wearie Wayfarer gave the foundation a distinctively local flavour.

In the foundation’s first ever Annual Report, then Executive Officer Jan McIntyre applauded the many people involved in the ‘legacy of the community savings account that will leave the Limestone Coast a more independent and sustainable region in future’.

Twenty years on and many annual reports later, the foundation is looking forward to an exciting future, said Chief Executive Officer Roger Babolka, who stepped into the top job in 2021.

“The next ten years are going to be quite spectacular, in terms of growth and capacity, and from our perspective, we think we can grow our corpus from $5.7million to $15-20million,” he said.

“People are starting to really feel and see the value of a community focused organisation.”

As for seeing the foundation through the next twenty years, being responsive and flexible around the region’s changing needs will be crucial, Roger said.

“It’s important that, when crises or natural disasters happen, such as the 2010 tornado in Penola or more recently, the Keilira bushfires in 2019, we have the capacity to step in and support those communities,” he said.

Adding to the foundation’s diverse mix of board representation, three new faces have joined this year, including Mount Gambier’s Sandra Parsons, Tatiara’s Tracey Grosser and Scott Harlock from Moyhall.

“From the top end to the bottom, we are for the region,” Roger said.

“It is truly the very definition of a community organisation and I just love what it has achieved over those twenty years, but also the way it goes about it. It’s just a good news story all round.”

Do you have a story to share about how a life or community was changed by the Stand Like Stone Foundation? We’d love to hear it. Contact [email protected]