Welcome to 2020!

Welcome to 2020! By Tony Penna - President I hope our community was able to have a break with their families across the festive season, which sadly, wasn’t so pleasant for many in the bushfire affected areas of our country. Let’s hope we have seen the worst of it despite our fire season not being over yet. My thoughts are with everyone in those communities. I want to use this month’s column to promote our “Southbank Community Day”. As I mentioned in my last column, on Saturday, March 21 the Southbank Residents’ Association, with the support of the City of Melbourne, will be holding a community day at our new Boyd Park. This has been a vision of mine for probably the last three or four years and I am delighted that finally our committee is able to act on this. As I mentioned, we are holding this with the support of the City of Melbourne. In years gone by we have applied for a community grant from the City of Melbourne for financial support, but we had always been unsuccessful for various reasons. Finally, we were able to navigate the grants process and last year we were successful with being awarded a grant for this community day. In essence, the plan was to bring together all aspects of our Southbank community. Our community is broad with a number of arts institutions, schools, government and businesses. There are also quite a few community groups which many didn’t even know existed. With the recent redesign of the Boyd Park we thought it would also be a great opportunity for the Lord Mayor Sally Capp to use our community day as an opportunity to officially open the park. The Lord Mayor agreed and is delighted to attend. The actual make-up of the day is still coming together. We are anticipating many of our community groups will be represented. There will be various presentations and entertainment throughout the day with a number of talks in Boyd’s Assembly Hall covering a variety of topics. There will be lots of fun for children and food for everyone. The day will run from 10am to 4pm. I encourage everyone to visit at some time during the day to meet others from our community and learn about our community groups. If this day is truly a success then maybe it could be the first of an annual event. I will provide more detailed information in my March column. Remember our organisation relies on membership. Would you like to join and support our group? • More information:  southbankresidents.org.au