campusreview.com.au
volunteering: how we could do more of it, recognise it, make it
seamless or easier. We passed HR policies on the fly. A volunteer
‘matching site’ created by our students and alumni, called Helping
Hands, went through the roof in terms of demand, and it is still in
place. We encouraged all volunteers to identify others for special
commendation. The atmosphere was sombre but equally uplifting.
And it was unforgettable.
I have never seen anything like it. The pride which that upwelling
of civic, collective and university pride engendered was more
than I had observed at any time in my academic career. It was
outstanding. We hosted an evacuation centre for more than
380 people in our conference facility. People, pets and priests were
all in attendance. We opened up our Enterprise lab to any local
business which had been wiped out. If they had no electricity or
internet access or even a dry roof, we offered them our own. We
held the major Flood Reconstruction meeting on behalf of the
Chamber of Commerce and Industry on our campus, and more
than 420 people attended – at 7am on day four of the crisis. Only
a minority of those people had ever attended the university as
students. For all of them it was a revelation.
And it was a revolution of volunteering.
Let’s take another index of enlightenment: willingness to
resettle refugees. While there is strong opposition to refugee
migration and resettlement in some parts of Australia, cities
like Coffs Harbour in NSW are among the highest in per
capita refugee acceptance. It lives and breathes international
recognition and integration. It offers housing support, language
support, health support. And so do we.
Across the board, Coffs Harbour is committed to inclusion and
forward-thinking. It is also a city which boasts (with Southern Cross)
the highest number of young Indigenous students (from Years 9
to 12) involved in the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience
(AIME). There are over 1000 young First Nations students involved
in AIME at all levels – a nation-leading figure. And the conversion
rate of those students to further study (VET or university) or
employment at the end of Year 12 is 98 per cent – the highest
in Australia. It is those sorts of statistics which give me great
pride. And they are based on volunteering: every one of those
1000 students was mentored by a Southern Cross undergraduate
or graduate volunteer.
The same progressive thinking and action applies throughout the
university’s footprint – from just south of Brisbane to the mid-north
coast of NSW. The Northern Rivers region is home to the second-
highest per capita population of creative professionals in Australia
(especially in music and visual art). And Lismore is the NSW city with
the highest per capita participation rate in solar power installation.
The southern Gold Coast and northern NSW zone is now
ramping up as a major area for alternative creative startup
industries. Take, for example, the Flow Hive beekeeping system
pioneered by Cedar Anderson and his colleagues over the past
two years. Cedar grew up just outside Lismore and is a committed
environmentalist and naturalist.
This revolutionary new approach to apiaries not only protects
bees but enhances the gravity flow of honey. It is so impressive
that when it was launched on the social media site Indiegogo,
it was fully subscribed – worldwide – in exactly 477 seconds.
Cedar Anderson’s company now employs 30 people in a
factory outside Byron Bay and has sold more than $15 million
of the Flow Hive product over the past year. This is a wonderful
VC’s corner
example of the ingenuity we see every day, locally, at Southern
Cross University.
For example, at our fast-growing Gold Coast campus – just
a 10-minute walk from Gold Coast International Airport – new
degrees in digital business and digital health will benefit from these
fast-moving innovations.
One of our key and most respected partners in digital health is
Feros Care, a highly original and