Chairperson’s Report AGM November 2020

Welcome and thank you for attending the Gambling Impact Society’s Annual General Meeting for 2020, our 20th year of incorporation. Incredibly, given the significant local and global issues, this has been one of our most successful years in terms of work achieved with our small committee.

During the last year, with the support of funds from the Office of Responsible  Gambling (ORG) we completed another round of Consumer Voice educational programs across the Hunter/Newcastle and South West Sydney regions as well as a more ‘online gambling’ focussed  Lived Experience  project for other NSW areas. We also supported Gambling Harm awareness projects internal to the Office of Responsible Gambling. Some of these videos can be viewed at https://bit.ly/2Pawr2q.

Behind the scenes,  some other achievements were the establishment of  a Peer Support network for our team of Consumer Voices/Lived Experience speakers and an online content sharing point using MS Teams. This also enabled the redevelopment of our community education programs to be presented in an online format through Zoom, Skype and Teams as we adapted to a new work environment during the pandemic.

COVID19 stalled our programs briefly, but through the persistent work of our project manager and IT specialist ,we managed to bring together our content online and were able to pitch, present and evaluate all of our Consumer Voices/Lived Experience presentations in an online format, whilst meeting or exceeding our arrangement with ORG.

COVID19 forced us to accelerate our movement towards online content, as it did for everyone. This has been an educational journey for everyone and allowed us to support many of our team in transitioning to online meeting formats.

I would like to acknowledge and thanks the NSW government for supporting our Consumer Voices/Lived Experience programs.

In conclusion I’d like to congratulate the management and staff of GIS, for their persistence and flexibility in continuing the progress our programs during a this pandemic – a once in a century event. Well done everyone.

Stay safe and be well.

Yours faithfully

Leigh Mason