Context The Clarence Country Universities Centre provides supported study spaces for regional students enrolled at universities elsewhere. The CUC model addresses the access barriers relating to geographic distance from tertiary campuses, the cost of relocation, and the loss of local talent to metropolitan centres. In the early engagement we discussed how the CUC might benefit […]
Case study 2025 lifelong learning Read More
Context Grafton has approximately twelve op shops, six on each side of the river. These op shops range from large institutional operations to smaller church-attached shops and independent operations. Each faces shared challenges: managing product intake, educating the community on what to donate, measuring collective impact, managing waste, and sustaining volunteer capability. These challenges are
Case Study 2025 The Grafton Op Shop Collective Read More
The 2026 Ready Communities Impact and Action report – Regions in Transition outlines a range of ways to create sustainable change in regional communities. The following highlights examples across Australia in the area of physical hubs, education hubs, third spaces and regional precincts. Physical hubs, third spaces, and regional precincts provide built infrastructure through which
Physical hubs, education hubs, third spaces, and regional precincts Read More
The 2026 Ready Communities Impact and Action report – Regions in Transition outlines a range of ways to create sustainable change in regional communities. The following highlights examples across Australia in the area of collective models and cooperatives. Collective models involve similar types of entities coming together to share infrastructure, access markets, or build capacity
Collective models and cooperatives Read More
The 2026 Ready Communities Impact and Action report – Regions in Transition outlines a range of ways to create sustainable change in regional communities. The following highlights examples across Australia in the area of Local retail, shop local and main street activation programs. Buy local campaigns run by councils and chambers of commerce use branding,
Local retail, shop local and main street activation programs Read More
Each year Ready Communities chooses one regional community to host our annual ‘Flagship’ program which includes the national conference, Social Impact in the Regions. As the program rolls out the host community builds both readiness, and capacity in delivering business events. We work with smaller towns, towns that are often described as the ‘gap in
Is your community business event ready? Read More
Stanthorpe has been selected to take part in the Ready Communities program, a nationally recognised place-based approach that supports regional towns to shape their own future, on their own terms. Over the next two years, Ready Communities will work alongside local people, organisations, businesses and leaders to build the conditions that help good ideas turn
Ready Communities program kicks off in Stanthorpe Read More
In regional and rural communities, good ideas are rarely in short supply.What is often missing are the conditions that allow those ideas to land, grow and endure. Readiness is about those conditions. In the Ready Communities context, readiness refers to the collective state of a community to shape, attract and sustain positive change. It is
What readiness really means for regional communities Read More
Is your community ready? Regional communities are filled with potential. Ideas, energy, and commitment already exists but too often, change stalls because the enabling conditions are not in place. That’s where the Ready Communities Local Impact Facilitator Program fits. The program has been developed following decades of work supporting and deep research supporting hundreds of
Local Impact Facilitator Program Read More
This week we had the privilege of attending a special meeting of the Rotary Club of Grafton, one of five local Rotary clubs active in the Clarence Valley. The event was a celebration of student Luci, who is returning from her Rotary Youth Exchange to Italy, and also an acknowledgment of the many young people
Grafton NSW: A town with youth leadership in focus Read More