Race Club Granted Big Bucks For Upgrade
Melissa Driscoll
Towers Jockey Club has scored $944,960 from the federal government’s Building Better Regions Fund.
When matched with Racing Queensland funding for track work, this grant will deliver a community event centre worth $1,259,960 to benefit the club, the racing industry, the community and the local economy.
The new TJC Community Event Centre will enable Towers Jockey Club to run more race meetings and attract bigger crowds. The club’s financial position will also be boosted with the ability to hire the facility for major functions such as weddings, conferences and field days, filling an event venue gap not currently offered in Charters Towers.
How did Towers Jockey Club achieve this?
CPR Group, Australia’s leading sports governance and community development firm, assisted the club to firstly develop a five-year strategic plan back in 2018 – their vision was workshopped and drawn, with timelines set and jobs delegated to ensure things would happen.
This was on the back of almost nine years of hard work by passionate club members to improve race day offerings, sponsorship, track surface and facility appearance, governance, policies and procedures. This work set them up to be ready to start the serious planning required for major facility upgrades to fulfil their dreams of taking things to the “next level”.
The next step was to establish a facility and concept plan, with CPR Group’s landscape architect creating diagrams, maps and visualisations. These images made it easy for the club to engage with locals, Council, Racing Queensland, state and federal members of parliament, and other funding providers. The facility and concept plan also took the project to the “shovel ready” stage, enabling the complete $5.4 million project to be fully-costed.
The final stage was the grant submission, which included development of a business case and cost benefit analysis to demonstrate the project’s merits against the funding objectives. CPR Group prepared the successful grant application and supporting documents.
By being truly grant ready with a project that is full of merit, dreams really can come true!
Hear more on the podcast Basket Case Clubs where Michael and Melissa talk to Sally Kirkwood, CEO and Secretary of Towers Jockey Club.
