Eurobodalla Community Support Network holds workshops and meetings for community groups. Photos: Steph Chiu.
This winter, three volunteer expos will bring together the Eurobodalla’s many and diverse community organisations that contribute so much to the shire.
Members of the public will have the opportunity to learn about the huge range of volunteer roles and how they can match their skills, experience and passions to add to the community groups’ capabilities.
The Community and Volunteer Expos will be held in Narooma on 23 May, Moruya on 12 June and Batemans Bay on 13 June.
The free events are being coordinated by Eurobodalla Community Support Network (ECSN) and designed in partnership with 12 volunteering organisations and two council teams. ECSN wants every community group to participate in the expos as a stallholder and potentially in an online community directory.
In 2025, ECSN’s members talked a great deal about the need to strengthen volunteering organisations and the sector. In late 2025, ECSN received $20,000 in grant funding from the Centre of Volunteering to hold the expos, plus workshops.
The idea of an expo had been bubbling between Jenny Petterd of CWA Narooma Branch and Quota Club Narooma’s Michelle Wilson for some time.
“Jenny and I were catching up and talking about the challenges our organisations faced and how we could collaborate and work through some of those challenges,” Ms Wilson said.
A Eurobodalla Community Support Network workshop.
Several community groups came together to provide a huge breakfast as part of the Narooma Oyster Festival. It showed how valuable it was for groups to meet and understand each other better.
In November, they booked a venue, had a list of community groups to invite and ideas about what the event would look like. They did not have a good marketing plan, though. That was when ECSN came on board with its grant funding.
“We have large numbers of people coming to Narooma to retire,” Ms Wilson said. ”Many have had great jobs and have amazing skills in leadership, financial management and grant writing, and they are looking to get involved in the community.
“The idea was to showcase what our organisations do and match organisations with people’s skills to get a more diverse volunteer base. We don’t necessarily need more numbers, but we do need younger people and more diversity.”
Steph Chiu is the coordinator of ECSN. She said member organisations thought expos would be good for networking.
“You have no idea where your next volunteer will come from, so there must be interconnectivity and communication out to the public,” she said.
Each expo will be place-specific, bespoke and relevant to the town.
ECSN originally partnered with Rotary and now has 12 host partners.
Eurobodalla Community Support Network helps groups to share information.
As well as the expos, ECSN will hold workshops to help community groups connect with each other, understand the needs and barriers, and from that provide training in areas such as digital literacy.
Everyone is invited, from young people, retirees and those about to retire, to the so-called sandwich generation, whose members are caring for both their children and their parents.
“That group is so crucial in the transfer of information and plays an important role in social cohesion,” Ms Chiu said.
”Volunteering is known to be a great pathway for learning new skills and making young people more attractive to employers because of their experience of collaborating on projects.”
ECSN was formed after the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires by Von Hutcheson, then of Anglicare, and Bryan Smith, then of the National Emergency Management Centre. They were participating in post-fire recovery networks up and down the coast. They saw Eurobodalla did not have one where anyone could come to talk about preparedness and building resilience.
It started with bi-monthly meetings and slowly turned into a community network “because it is hard, and still is, for community organisations to connect and pass on information, even just about events and the services available”, Ms Chiu said.
“There is just so much on offer and people don’t know about it. Every time I meet someone new, my idea about what is available changes, I feel more connected and am more inclined to take a call or respond to an email.”
ECSN has more than 80 community organisations on board and more than 250 people on the emailing list.
They meet monthly. The next meeting, on 22 April, will explore mental health, health access and connectivity, homelessness, housing and transport in the shire. Each person will have a chance to speak, share information and hear about relevant State Government initiatives from Bega MP Dr Michael Holland. The meeting runs from 11:15 am to 2:15 pm at Rooma Studio, 98a Campbell Street, Narooma.
