Lived Experience and Community Voice on Non-for-Profit Boards

Ensuring that the community you represent has a voice within your board is a critical part of maintaining legitimate governance for your organisation. This workshop will explore models for ensuring that community voice is an effective part of the decision-making framework that your board uses.

This workshop will cover:

• The benefits of having people with lived experience on your board
• Models of two-way governance
• Making board meetings inclusive and having every opportunity to succeed
• Communication tools to support full participation
• Putting people at ease with meetings outside the boardroom
• Establishing user-led committees to represent all voices of service users, not only one person.
• Recruiting and onboarding board members with lived experience

 Presented by:

Jon Staley | Trainer, governance and community leadership
BA (Hons), DipEd, Certificate IV (Training and Assessment), Dip Gov, FICDA

Jon has a background as a teacher, trainer, social entrepreneur, filmmaker and writer. He began his career teaching at Melbourne’s Northland Secondary College, where in 2000 he was awarded the Peter Clarke Teaching for Reconciliation Award based on his work with the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal community at the school. He spent several years being mentored by and working alongside Gunditjmara artist and filmmaker Richard Frankland and together they developed a cross-cultural education program, Planting Seeds, which shone a light on the invisible load that Aboriginal communities in Australia have carried in the wake of colonisation.

In 2008 Jon founded the not-for-profit youth media social enterprise Youthworx, which uses creative and commercial media to work with young people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness, and he led the organisation until 2020 when he joined Our Community.

Jon has been teaching ICDA’s acclaimed Diploma of Governance since 2020.