Clubs and the Canberra community
Community support
ACT clubs are a genuine community success story. Since the early days of Canberra the community has used its club structure to provide for the many and diverse social and recreational needs that it has. Now, about 80% of adult Canberrans belong to one or more of our sporting, social, cultural, worker, professional and returned service clubs. In aggregate membership of clubs in the ACT is now almost 420,000.
It would be hard to imagine a Canberra without clubs:
- they augment and enrich the social fabric of our city;
- they offer a safe, controlled and family oriented environment where members are known and recognised and have a sense of belonging; and
- they are proudly mutual organisations established by groups of people sharing a common interest.
As non-profit organisations clubs have a different focus to other enterprises. Their common purpose is to benefit their members and the community. The focus of clubs is on satisfying their "shareholder" - the Canberra community.
More than 200,000 Canberrans are members of at least one club with aggregate memberships well over 500,000. Canberrans like their clubs. Clubs will commonly have 50,000 or more members.
Clubs have fulfilled their role in the community for many years with clubs constantly looking to improve services to their members and to ensure that the communities in which clubs operate are supported.
Clubs are not-for-profit and the vast majority of revenue earned by clubs goes back into the Canberra community.
Many individual clubs can be proud of the good work and support that they provide to a range of charities, organisations and individuals. Collectively, Canberra's clubs contributed more than $13m in 2009/10 to a large number of charitable, sporting and community organisations. This is roughly double the amount of money legislation requires clubs to contribute. Over the last 8 years, more than $109m has been donated to the Canberra community.
ClubsACT''s major community partner is The Cerebral Palsy Alliance. Each year, ClubsACT provides more than $120,000 to support the excellent work of the Alliance in Canberra and the region. This relationship is more than a decade old and is one ClubsACT is very proud of.
ClubsACT also runs its annual Charity Golf Classic which raises funds for a nominated charity - recent recipients have included Galilee, Ted Knoffs Foundation, Koomarri, AFFIRM (mental health research) and most recently the ACT Branch of the National Breast Cancer Foundation.
These significant headline numbers really understate the extent of the contribution that individual clubs make which, as well as cash contributions, includes in-kind support and, in many cases, involvement with the recipient.
At any function, charity or call for support, you will invariably find a community based club in the midst of things and a generous participant and contributor.
The use of meeting rooms to a diverse range of social groups, the provision of office space and the supply of equipment are commonly offered by the clubs at no cost.
In many cases groups such as charities, schools, aged care, art and craft groups and regional and ethnic community services groups would not be funded if it was not for a club.
Clubs provided opportunities for over two and half thousand volunteers to donate almost 200,000 hours of voluntary work.
Clubs are dedicated to supporting the Canberra community.