The Brisbane City Council Learning and Development Program, which began in 2020 and runs until 2023, aimed to provide online training sessions to improve the knowledge and skills of Brisbane City Council staff and community facility tenants. The program included monthly interactive webinars for community sport and recreation organisations, separate online training sessions for BCC community facilities staff, and a series of instructional videos to help tenants navigate Council's processes for community leasing and to deal with flood preparedness and recovery.
The challenges faced by community facilities customers and staff include declining volunteerism, increased compliance expectations and inefficient governance systems impacting organisational viability and volunteer capacity. In addition, the not-for-profit sector is under significant pressure to meet a range of legislative, procedural, and state body requirements that impact volunteers' ability to keep up-to-date and deliver services efficiently.
To address these challenges, we delivered sessions on good governance, preparing and running an Annual General Meeting, strategic and facility planning, and making better use of technology, as well as a special session each year to celebrate success stories of local organisations.
We have conducted live training webinars for Council staff, covering topics such as dealing with difficult committees, changing club mindsets, having challenging conversations, managing sub-users and issues, time management, and understanding governance and committee management.
The sessions were complemented by practical concepts and tools that could be implemented easily by participating staff and volunteers. Our methodology involved co-designing each of the staff and community training and webinar sessions with Council, preparing draft content for each session, developing session blurbs for Council to send around to its network to advertise the sessions, setting up each community webinar session on our webinar hosting platform, and managing online registrations and pre- and post-session communications with registrants.
To help make it easy for community volunteers and new Council staff to navigate BCC's community leasing processes, we developed instructional videos on key Council information, including leasing 101, closed landfill management and good neighbour practices. Each video was short and engaging.
Overall, the Brisbane City Council Learning and Development Program has been an ongoing success. It continues to enhance the knowledge and skills of the volunteers in the community organisations that lease Council's facilities. Participating staff and volunteers have reported feeling more confident in their roles and now feel better equipped to handle the challenges of running their organisations.
If you have any question or queries on this or other BCC webinar programs, please contact CPR Group here
