COVID-19 governance snapshot

12 May 2020

Helen Watson

Victory Community Centre Board - Chair
Employable - Board Chair

Tell us a little bit about the organisations you chair?

Victory Community Centre provides a range of health and wellbeing services from our site on the Victory Primary School campus and we have a board of nine people.

Employable provides supported employment services to people with disabilities, as well as employment training and development for a broader population. It has a board of five people.

How have the boards of these organisations’ responded to the COVID lockdown?

In both organisations we have confident and adaptive teams, and competent leaders, who know their communities well. Managers developed good action plans that were implemented quickly. So initially, at a board level, our response was to stand back and let the teams lead. The board’s role was to provide support. Over time the boards have become more involved, focussing on support for staff, responding to cash flow issues, rethinking responses to community need, and more recently focussing on organisational sustainability in the longer term.

A critical relationship for both organisations is our relationship with our funders, so an early focus was keeping them informed, and working together with them in an ongoing way around formulating a community-wide response.

The next issue to focus on was cashflow. Both organisations have excellent financial support, but there has been a lag in developing an understanding of what’s going on financially. Most of the funding for both organisations comes from government and philanthropic bodies. Neither the Community Centre or Employable have had to access the government’s wage subsidy.

Financially, the second half of the year will be more telling. For the community sector in general, over time there’s a risk that the pool of money coming through gaming funds like Lotteries will diminish.

How many people do these organisations employ and what have they done during lockdown?

Employable has six staff and the Victory Community Centre has seven.

The Employable team have adapted quickly to virtual contact, but the team’s ongoing challenge will be re-connecting with clients as we come out of lock-down. Employment uncertainty will impact more significantly on our client group so the team’s response will be on innovative ways to provide ongoing support to our community.

At the community centre, three of our staff have been working on the COVID testing stations in Nelson. We’re very fortunate that our staff are motivated to face that challenge and get amongst it. It’s been gratifying to see how they’ve continued the ethos of the community centre’s work in that way.

How has COVID affected your board schedule?

I’ve had three board meetings across the two organisations during lockdown. It’s been disruptive because at this time of year we would normally be holding strategic planning workshops, but we’ve pushed these back in the year. In the case of VCC we’ve added extra meetings to our schedule to respond the complexity of the situation.

What’s your biggest concern as we head out of lockdown?

Both Employable and VCC have a very good understanding of our respective communities. So our focus is on how we respond to any increase in need, how we work collaboratively to respond, how we redirect resources, being clear about our role in the context of a bigger system response.

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