Community Services

Governance and strategy for community-services, faith-based and peak-body boards.

2 min read

Community-services organisations, faith-based providers and peak bodies make up much of what makes Australia work below the level of government. They support families and children, people with mental illness, people in housing stress, people newly arrived in the country, communities recovering from disaster, and the workforces and members of every other Not-For-Profit sector. Their boards govern across funding models that shift, public expectations that change, and missions that are usually generations old.

What community-services boards are working on

The agenda for boards in this part of the sector includes:

  • Strategic positioning across competing demands from funders, members, clients and communities.
  • Governance practice fit for the scale and complexity of multi-program, multi-region and multi-jurisdictional organisations.
  • Financial sustainability under tendered, contracted and increasingly individualised funding models.
  • Federated structures, peak-body relationships and the governance arrangements that hold national bodies and state members together.
  • Mergers, amalgamations and partnerships, particularly between faith-based providers and other community-services organisations facing structural change.
  • Workforce capacity, leadership succession and the cultural shift demanded by reformed funding and accreditation regimes.

How we work in community services

Australian Strategic Services has worked with community-services organisations, faith-based providers and peak bodies for more than 30 years. The work spans strategic planning, governance review and renewal, board and CEO performance evaluation, organisational redesign, and merger and partnership advisory. The practical governance system used in our engagements, TAGS, is widely used by community-services boards across the country.

Articles and case studies

Talk to us about your community-services board.