Southern Hub Report
The Southern Hub has been an idea discussed over the past 12 months. We have run a number of satellite social event but finally got all our RGCs together for the 1st meeting of the actual hub Feb 11 at the Southern Fieldays.
We drew in our regional convenors with Katrina Thomas as our leader. Emily Woolsey, Anna Dakila, Lynne Johnson and myself.
The basis of forming the Southern Hub is to pick up all the unsupported regions within our province and to run satellite meetings to ensure we had thorough coverage over the region.
Whilst our modules will still be run in Winton, Gore and Balclutha/Clinton the need to service other areas with smaller events is apparent.
Katrina moves into the leadership role as we will use her organizational and event management skills to support our weaker areas. Katrina also has a good grounding in media and excels in promoting and advertising our events to ensure we get numbers.
We have also decided to add Otago south of Dunedin picking up Central Otago as well in a bid to support remote dairy women and also women in dairy support.
What I found in our areas where that our less experienced RGCs were quite daunted at the ease and numbers Katrina was able to get to her events and her ability to call on resourceful people to speak and support her. As she has been in this role for a number of years in makes sense to use these skills and have an overarching support for all our RGCs, upskill and mentor them to make our regions stronger and more supported.
We plan to do a SWOT analysis on our skills and have mentor sessions on what we need to improve on within our rgc, co rgc roles. Having Katrina in this role also makes it easier to recruit RGCs as they are supported and safe to start in their role knowing Katrina is beside them to ensure things run smoothly.
We are continuing to run smaller social coffee catch ups, or Dairy dates around the region to ensure we are supporting our women and to get an idea of what is needed in our area heading forward into the future. This has also helped us identify where we may need smaller groups established throughout and also to identify up and coming leaders.
Katrinas role will also cover the Facebook administration and rolling out of the media releases and using the local media to support and advertise our events. We have a very good relationship with the media and Katrina ensures we get the best out of them.
Our communication with this group is using a closed group private messenger service.
There are a couple of women that have been identified to me that could potentially slot into a RGC role and now training has passed I hope to contact them and welcome them into our group.
Whilst we have small numbers leading at present this is a way to share resources, form more groups without the cost of supporting each individual RGC. We can share knowledge, support the weaker and ultimately increase our DWN coverage to the best we can in this large Southern region.
Page | 1 by Cathie Cotter