2019-12-10 P&E Agenda - Item 6 - Attachment 1 - NBRF Annual Report 2018-19

1. REPORT FROM THE CHAIR (Dick Barnes)


I am pleased to provide this Annual Report for Fiscal 2018/19 to the Members of NBRF, to the Noosa Shire
Council and hence to the Noosa community in general. The report from the Chair aims to highlight important
activities and future initiatives.


FINANCIALS

We are pleased to say that, once again, we have a clean audit report.

For this, I would like to thank here Sarah Radge (our admin support), Tanja Maclachlan (book keeping support),
Rebecca Armitage (accounting support from Otto & Partners) and James Kenward (SAAS Audit). We have many
complex transactions involving quite large sums of money and I thank the team for keeping this under control.

As the following sections 2 and 3 show, the NBRF is meeting it’s commitments and has adequate reserves for the
immediate future.

NEW WAYS OF WORKING AND PROJECTS

Following the extensive debate last year around the funding of NBRF, the Directors were charged to bring forward
and action “big ideas” themselves rather than by running grant rounds. Community engagement would still be a
part of the identification and action plans for the ideas.

As described later in section 6 (New ways of Working) to help with this, we have adopted a methodology that
covers brainstorming, expert research, piloting and implementation. This was pioneered in the Bring Back the Fish
project and has proved very useful.

For most of this reporting year, we have concentrated on finishing the projects in hand (section 5) and in
developing potential ideas for the future (section 7).

In summary, we have finished most of our projects from the Grant Rounds and are developing an exciting portfolio
of future big ideas.

FUNDING AVAILABLE

As a result of the new funding agreement, we are very grateful that the Council has funded our operational budget
to the tune of $120,000. This is a small reduction on previous years in line with general efficiency cuts. This is
particularly important as it enables the Board to leverage the work of the volunteer Board with expert support and
research.

$250,000 was carried forward from last year for projects. We have started funding new ideas from this and it will
be supplemented in the future from specific project grant applications to both Council and elsewhere.

FUND RAISING

We have been challenged to increase our level of fund raising and this has just started alongside our new
approach to big ideas.

We would point out that we operate a three to one leverage on any funds we provide and, so far, our activities
have brought in additional cash contributions of over $600,000 together with “in kind” effort approaching $1.5m.
Perhaps we have not stressed this enough in past presentations and reports.



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