President's Patter

by Kym Kovan

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Hello, I'm Kym Kovan, President of the Gender Centre. As I write this it is hard to realise that a large part of a year of great change at the Gender Centre has passed. So much change that, amongst many other things, I am the only one left of the original Management Committee that was voted in at the last A.G.M.!

We have had the usual movement of people in and out of the committee, work commitments etc., and also a few more dramatic ones where ethical/moral/political dilemmas could not be resolved but the end result is now a Management Committee that has all the needed knowledge and ability to do the role needed of it. I would like to reassure everyone that the basic directions given by the voting at and discussions after the last A.G.M. are being continued by the current committee, and they are all people active in our community in various ways and are well aware of the community's needs.

Part of what we have been doing is assessing the needs of the community and how the Gender Centre can best do its role of fulfilling those needs. We have commissioned a survey and also studied other reports that have been recently published. We are now restructuring the Gender Centre's activities to more closely match the needs of the community. This includes the full-time staff and the facilities of the Centre itself. It is an ongoing process, we have to keep our funding bodies aware of what we are doing and make sure that we can still do the tasks they ask of us.

We get funded quite specifically for certain things, such as H.I.V. related activities, and have to use our funds for those tasks. Where we feel the funding body's need does not exactly match the community's needs we are entering into discussion with the funding body to see if we can change the situation.

There is one thing that we as a committee see quite overwhelmingly and that is that the Gender Centre is meant to be a resource for all of the community to use, regardless of any political leanings or anything else. If you want us, we should be there, giving the facilities that you need. We are putting in place now the mechanisms that can make that happen and I hope that in the years ahead there will be folk that will have their life a little easier as a result.

This is the first in what I hope will be a long time of "President's Patter's", a way to keep you all informed of what is going on at the Gender Centre at the management level. I hope, in return, that you will give us feedback in any way that you can so that we can keep in touch with you. This particularly applies to those of you outside the Sydney Metropolitan area, your needs are as important as the folk living next door to me here in Sydney as I cannot talk to you in the same way I can talk to them. The Management Committee has an "in-tray" at the Gender Centre, and" would much prefer to find it full of notes from afar than a pile of forms to fill out!

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