May 03, 2024 | Katie Wand
On Wednesday 1 May, the Federation hosted a Community Legal Centre Fundraising Workshop with Amplify Fundraising. The all-day, in-person event focused on the unique fundraising opportunities for Community Legal Centres and was a great forum for the Victorian sector to connect, build skills, and strengthen relationships.
The workshop brought together over 40 CEOs, senior lawyers and fundraising, communications or community development team members from 28 Community Legal Centres to share experiences and ideas, and to explore appropriate fundraising techniques for our types of organisations.
In 2023, the Victorian community legal sector launched its 10-Year Plan. Strategic Direction 4 of the plan is to build our future sustainability and growth, including strengthening the sector’s financial sustainability. The fundraising workshop was the first of a suite of activities that will be supported under the 10-Year Plan to improve the sector’s fundraising capability.
As part of the sharing and learning, Alex Haynes, CEO at Whittlesea Community Connections, spoke candidly about the end-of-year fundraising campaign that her team successfully ran in 2023. Alex talked about what worked well, the real-life challenges that they experienced, how these were overcome, what the team would do differently next time, and the campaign’s outcomes. Hearing relevant experiences like Whittlesea's was a terrific way to see how the ideas and concepts that we had been discussing during the day could be put into practice by other Community Legal Centres.
The Federation thanks Paul Bailey from Amplify Fundraising for helping Victorian Community Legal Centres to explore their fundraising potential.
