Time to celebrate two decades

“Life is mostly froth and bubble, two things stand like stone, kindness in another’s trouble, courage in your own.” They are the immortal words of Adam Lindsay Gordon and the mantra of the Limestone Coast’s first ever community foundation – the Stand Like Stone Foundation.

Stand Like Stone is a visionary community foundation and it is fitting that to celebrate its 20th anniversary, Community Foundations Australia CEO Ian Bird, as former Olympian, will be the guest speaker at a celebratory lunch on November 8.

Kicking off at 12.30pm, the lunch will also see some personal anecdotes to showcase the work of the foundation and the people who have helped shape it over the past two decades.

The lunch is being hosted at The Barn and tickets are $105 a head, or $1000 for a table of 10, for a two course meal with beverages included.

Head to HTTPS://WWW.TRYBOOKING.COM/CVJWA to book your place and help celebrate 20 years of helping the community.

In 2014, when the foundation celebrated 10 years, then chair, Sue Charlton, who was a huge driver of setting up the foundation in the first place, reflected on just what it took to build what is now an integral part of supporting the Limestone Coast community.

Sue reflected on a journey that had borne out the adage that from little things big things grow. And not only was she proud of what the foundation had achieved in its first decade and excited about its future plans, she was also amazed – admitting even she had learnt so much about just how even the seemingly smallest gesture can change lives.

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The Stand Like Stone Foundation story actually started five years before it came into being, as community members and the then Area Consultative Committee looked to tap into a Federal Government grants program and investigate just how a community foundation might work in this region. “It was about making communities more autonomous and more self sufficient,” Sue said.

Community foundations, while huge in the United States at the time, were a relatively new concept in Australia. Testament to that, is Stand Like Stone, which was one of the earlier Australian community foundations, celebrated a decade of operation in 2014 – the same year community foundations worldwide celebrate their centenary.

The local development of the foundation faced two significant hurdles – finding the best way to explain the concept to the community and bringing the region together and allaying fears it was a Mount Gambier centric idea.

Time and the work of Stand Like Stone started to overcome those obstacles. The foundation, in fact, was established right around the time the South East was being rebranded Limestone Coast and it presented foundation organisers with a dilemma – what to call this new organisation.

“The name Limestone Coast was a nothing phrase and there were so many places in the region it didn’t seem to relate to so we didn’t want to use that,” Sue said. “That was when the Adam Lindsay Gordon words came to the fore and the name Stand Like Stone was born – it was the message we wanted to be spreading – that we can look after ourselves, that we need to be conscious of what other people around us need and work with them to create the end result we’re looking for. Stand Like Stone is about a hand up not a hand out.”

The foundation was never about competing with local charity groups either – it’s why they never run badge days or raffles. “We’ve always stayed off their patch,” Sue said. “We can’t provide one off support for a family, there are strict rules by which we have to abide but we work closely with all those groups so we can point people in the right direction.”

Put simply, the foundation was a project based organisation as a general rule. They have formed partnerships with ADASE, a mental health support network, and the Regional Foodbank – organisations that reach out to the community and fulfil a genuine need.

And the Stand Like Stone Foundation were fast approaching an impressive milestone with the financial value of that help across the region in its 10 year celebration year where it was on target to hit one million dollars having been put back into the community.

The initial program the foundation undertook in its formative years was the Back To School Program where $50 vouchers are distributed throughout the region’s schools to students in need. It was Stand Like Stone’s first foray into giving to the community and was done in partnership with Foundation for Rural & Regional Renewal (FRRR) which matches the fundraising of the local community to provide the vouchers. Getting involved in this program that has already poured more than $250,000 into education in this region was the first of many eye openers for Sue.

“When we were first asked to be part of the program I thought what is that going to do for anybody and I’ve had to eat so much humble pie,” Sue said. “I’ve come to learn how much $50 really is and how it can turn a family around.”

A typical story was one Sue tells of a grandmother who was caring for the children and her young grandson was not attending school. He didn’t have the right uniform and he had no shoes. A Back To School voucher allowed grandma to buy him some shoes and he has not missed a day of school since. “It has changed a child’s life,” Sue said.

The vouchers have also allowed school principals who allocate the vouchers to make some positive contact with families. “They are often dealing with families that never have anything to do with the school and never for a positive reason,” Sue said. “So many families couldn’t believe the school was doing something nice for them.”

A related education program was the foundation’s Stay At School Program which offered $500 to disenfranchised students who left school for one reason or another and now would like to return and complete their SACE, usually at the Independent Learning Centre.

An early recipient of this program spoke at the National Community Foundation forum held in Mount Gambier around five years ago and opened the eyes of all involved into how much these kind of initiatives change people’s lives.

“She was a young girl who couldn’t complete her beauty course because she didn’t have the right clothes to wear to work experience and she couldn’t afford her beauty supplies,” Sue said. “She told how she was given a cheque for $250 and she had never seen that much money in her life and she couldn’t believe someone had given it to her and didn’t expect anything except for her to keep studying.” She immediately invested it in the right clothes and supplies and then was astonished to receive her second $250 instalment. The 17 year old girl bought her baby some clothes and stocked the pantry and told how it just made her life so much easier. “Stories like that is what keeps you going,” Sue said.

Stand Like Stone also established an exciting partnership going forward with OneFortyOne Plantations, the group taking on the South East’s forests, and it meant the foundation had another new initiative to push with OneFortyOne putting in $20,000 recurring over three years for a forestry scholarship.

It was not limited to the hands on tree work, the industry needs administration staff, health workers, mechanics – there are a raft of career options.

“It was a very exciting development for us,” Sue said. “Once you start getting grants like this you seem to be able to attract even more.” The foundation administers other scholarships already, including one Sue’s brother established in their mother’s name – the LM Woodruff Memorial Scholarship – giving money to nursing students. All up, the foundation had 10 scholarships on offer across a variety of fields as it clocked over a decade.

Stand Like Stone had two major fundraisers a year in its early days – the Swinging With The Stars in June and the Limestone Coast Tattoo in November. The Tattoo is no longer an annual event but Swinging with the Stars continues to be the jewel, not just in the fundraising crown, but in raising awareness of the foundation, how it works and the support it provides.

“The dancers that get involved become ambassadors for Stand Like Stone and the communities they come from learn more about what we do,” Sue said. Adding the People’s Choice Award, which is a fundraising award also boosted the coffers. “The dancers get quite competitive with that,” Sue said.

But if that adds more funds to the Stand Like Stone Foundation bank balance then Sue Charlton is happy. “I think having a foundation is a wonderful opportunity for every community to really look at what their community needs and best to satisfy that,” she said. “The community is the best judge of what’s deserving in their community. I used to think we didn’t have a lot of needy people in our community that we were a lucky community but I’ve discovered in the lucky communities the unlucky people are just not seen and don’t get the help they really need and they don’t want to ask for it either.”

Sue was recognised in the 2014 Australia Day honours as a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for both her philanthropic and physiotherapy work.