Deputy Lord Mayor to appear as guest speaker at SRA’s AGM

The SRA is pleased to announce our AGM will be held on Wednesday September 21, 6.30pm at the Boyd Community Hub. It is open for the entire community to attend and learn more about what we do and what we have done since our last AGM.

We often have a guest speaker and this year it will be Deputy Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece and Roger Teale, the council’s general manager of infrastructure and design, to give us the City of Melbourne response, as promised, from our community forum, “Southbank - where to from here?”, held in March last year.

We had more than 300 community members attend this forum with positive feedback. If you missed it, we live-streamed it to our Facebook page so please go to our page to catch up on all the discussion. You may recall there were a number of items raised in the forum, mainly covering the many Southbank plans from the past 10-plus years. Roger promised Southbank he would review all the current Southbank plans and report on where we are at with what they are proposing/offering. Well, this is that report! I think you will agree, this is one guest speaker that you won’t want to miss. Our committee have been waiting anxiously for this feedback, just as I am sure you have been. 

As we have always done in the past, we have extended an invitation to our local state member of parliament, Martin Foley. As you may be aware, Martin will be resigning at the end of this parliamentary term. Martin has served the Albert Park electorate since September 2007, some 15 years! Martin has always had a fond association with SRA over those years. He has certainly made himself available to our SRA committee whenever we have reached out to him. As usual, we will offer Martin the opportunity to address the attendees at the AGM. We always look forward to hearing from Martin and more so this year. 

Talking about elections ... the SRA has locked in dates for our upcoming state election Meet the Candidates event. After much deliberation by our committee, and after our previous event in 2018 where there were so many candidates from a broad array of parties, there was little time to effectively ask pertinent questions.

Once each candidate was given two minutes to introduce and sum-up at the end, and then respond to a very few questions throughout the night, it meant the evening was finished. We took your feedback on board and this year have decided to break it down into two groups. Wednesday November 9 for our Liberal, Labour and Greens candidates and the following day, Thursday November 10 for everyone else.

So please record these dates and come along to whichever one interests you, or better still, come along to both for a wholesome overview. Both events will be held at Boyd Community Hub at 6.30pm. 

The much-anticipated inaugural SRA Community Day, which was scheduled to be held in March 2020, until COVID-19 put an end to that, will now be re-programmed to occur in the coming months. Any interested Southbank community groups or groups servicing the Southbank neighbourhood should reach out to us and express their interest to be a part of the day.

We are also looking for any community volunteers to assist us with planning and executing this event. It will be a brilliant way for our community to come together to interact with each other and our community groups to present themselves to the neighbourhood. If you are a member of any community group or would like to offer to assist with our planning, then please send us an email. 

Finally, talking about volunteering, our AGM is an opportunity for any interested members to join our committee. We welcome any interested community members to reach out and express your interest, whatever skillset you may bring, or even if you would like the opportunity to hone a new skill.

In the past students have been interested as it is a great skill to have on their C.V. We know we will certainly be looking for volunteers to serve in treasurer, secretary, marketing, social media and membership roles. If you have any interest or would like to know more, please send us an email to [email protected]