Fairhaven Community Forum – DSE

Coast Action/Coastcare, in partnership with the Great Ocean Road Coast Committee and the Otway Coast Committee, held a Community Forum for Coastal Volunteers at the Fairhaven Surf Life Saving Club on Sunday the 29th of August. Over thirty coastal volunteers attended the event as well as staff from Coast Action/Coastcare, DSE, Great Ocean Road Coast Committee, Otway Coast Committee, Parks Victoria, Corangamite Catchment Management Authority and the Surf Coast Shire. The successful event celebrated volunteer achievements and demystified agency roles.

TRANSCRIPT

START Music Plays

00:00:43 (Matthew Fox- State Co-ordinator CACC) “Hi, my name is Matt. State Co-ordinator for Coast Action/Coastcare. We play and important role I think in linking people together, so that’s partly what today is about. We support about 150-200 groups, maybe 10,000 volunteers. So, it’s a really big state wide effort when you look at it across the state. Projects ranging from revegetation, ecological restoration works to species protection.”

00:01:09 (Ross Murray – Coastal Volunteer) “My name is Ross Murray and a recent arrival on the surf coast for the last 6 months. Being a retired farmer, I am very interested in what happens in the environment.”

00:01:21 (Ben Roberts) “My name is Ben Roberts, and I am a Landcare co-ordinator over in the Heytesbury district and I guess our role with Coastcare is facilitating Princetown Landcare group and sourcing funds for that group to undertake the coast action program that we did this year, which was a major boxthorn removal project down at Princetown.”

00:01:39 (Margaret MacDonald – Coastal Volunteer) “We’ve been involved with conservation volunteers Australia who got a caring for our country grant to re-align the estuary down at Moggs creek we have taken out a whole lot of kikuyu grass and planted indigenous species and have realigned the stormwater drain and have stopped the horses from driving up through our estuary and putting all their droppings and fouling the estuary and breaking down the hillside at they climb up onto the great ocean road.”

00:02:03 (Jeff – Facilitator) “Now as you look around the circle there are two types of people, people who’s stories you have heard and people who’s stories you haven’t heard and roughly you’ve heard half of the stories of the group in that process. We are going to pick up four or five of the stories that we think as a group were the most compelling and told the most about the importance of networks, working together on something. If Cate’s story had a title, what would it be?”

00:02:34 (Volunteer) “Initiative”

00:02:38 (Jeff – Facilitator) “Initiative, okay. Initiative with Cate, give Cate a round of applause.”