Annie Nash, Sector Development Officer speaks to us about what she does and how she uses goodcompany.

Our organisation: Federation of Community Legal Centres

The Federation leads and supports fifty-two Victorian community legal centres that pursue social equity and challenge injustice. Community legal centres provide free legal advice, information and representation to more than 100,000 Victorians each year.

Staff and volunteers: close to 500 staff - the majority part time staff, with over 1600 volunteers, including lawyers and law students.

My responsibilities: building capacity in community legal centres across Victoria.

Our greatest challenges: as a community organisation reliant on government funding, we are not always in a position to push for change as hard as we would like. We want justice for our clients and communities and we want it now - but as members of the non-profit industrial complex, we’re supported and at the same time constrained through our relationships with government and other stakeholders. Having said that, we are currently working in a much more cooperative way with government – it’s refreshing. We also have the amazing support of a whole range of pro-bono providers.

Personally: Having the time and resources to implement all the ideas we have to support our member centres to be more effective organisations.

How have you utilised goodcompany? I use goodcompany regularly – mostly as a place to refer our member centres. The success stories are clearly from organisations that have expressed their volunteer project clearly and the volunteer has been a ‘good fit’.

Right now, we have a volunteer providing great guidance on using Powerpoint and also providing Excel training for the whole team. We also have a marketer helping us out with marketing 'prison abolition' to the broader community.

Tips for Community Groups working with skilled volunteers: Brief volunteers honestly, and brief them well. Use the language you ordinarily use – don’t try to sound corporate or anything that you are not. To get the right person for the job, it’s important that you are clear about who you are, and what you want.

Tips for Volunteers working with community groups in skilled volunteering: be clear, upfront and honest about who you are and what you have to offer. Hang in there, its incredibly rewarding work, if you don’t enjoy your first gig, try another.

The main difference between the NFP and private sectors: Our bottom line is social justice and access to justice – theirs is fiscal.

What inspired you to get involved in your organisation? Community legal centres are effective because they are community based and they link their case-work with community legal education and policy and law reform. At the heart of CLCs work, is a commitment to social justice, and access to justice for the whole range of disadvantaged people in our community. Working at the Federation as the Sector Development Officer is the most challenging and rewarding job I have had. I get to spend all day every day working on ways to make CLCs more effective for them to work on improving the lives and rights of the most disadvantaged people in our community. My job is about building stronger and more effective community organisations. How lucky am I!