NSW Landcare Enabling Program

I'm passionate about Landcare because it's not just about environmental outcomes on ground, it's really about the communities that Landcare creates.

Landcare is and always will be a grassroots movement and it's really volunteer-led and community-driven.

It starts with those volunteer local groups on the   ground and the network of volunteers that  the Landcare Enabling Program supports.

The investment by the state government into Landcare has been vital in continuing the work of strengthening Landcare and the movement across the state.

The LEP really provides a framework  through which our regional members and Landcare NSW fit into that suite of government policies that are set up to effectively enable a more sustainable and resilient NSW.

The cornerstone of the Landcare Enabling Program is the Coordinators — the Local Coordinators and the Regional Coordinators.

They really are needed to  get those on-ground outcomes. They're Local Coordinators that are embedded in their communities.

They're part of their community, so they know the needs. Landcare could be involved in your local park, school, your farming practices.

It's about education, it's about, you know, people coming together and wanting to do better for the environment and their local community.

Everybody's welcome in Landcare and everybody knows that from a very closed, very isolated area

we've been able to bring people together and I've seen great big croppers who have seen little practice changes within grazing management and made huge differences to their personal wellbeing and their family wellbeing.

It's very exciting and we now have a model that we can move forward with you know, we can be sustainable, we can be   resilient, we can be profitable and it's all come from Landcare.

Well, I think it's great that Landcare has done this for the Parkes community because it's bringing everyone together. It's so important for the kids.

They're building their self esteem, upskilling them to be great citizens into the future for the Parkes community.

Landcare is going to be critical moving into the future for towns and communities  

like Lithgow where we're moving out from a very strong resource extraction base  

and looking at how we move our environment to meet the needs of our future communities.

We bring people in, we educate them on how they can make a difference through their citizen science projects and getting engagement and buy-in and involvement in these projects.

The Bats in Backyards is about harnessing the power of people and helping us to get our research further out.

The impact of working with Mid Macquarie Landcare has been huge.

It's so important if we want to look after species and we want to conserve our biodiversity, the only way to do that is to educate people.

Having that partnership with Landcare over the last few years has really enabled us to come to events that they've set up.

We're building on the relationships that they have directly with landholders, so that's a really big plus for us.

We're embedded in our communities so government agencies can come to Landcare as the partner that helps engage community to  be prepared for these climate events to come.

It's been really good to work with Landcare and people who are so invested in their community but also have the knowledge.

The work that YAN are doing with their Climate Ready Reveg is really innovative and forward thinking and will support ecosystems and communities for the future.

Local Land Services and Landcare at a regional, state, and local level work really closely together.

We can identify the strengths of both organisations and work together to create those meaningful partnerships on ground.

A lot of the work that LLS is developing and running across the state actually feeds into and supports a lot of the on-ground work that Landcare does.

There's this amazing professional network of technically-minded, skilled, and knowledgeable people in both areas now.

Now that Western Landcare has their full staff, that really enables to support Local Land Services working with our pest groups,

they're able  to really do a lot of that engagement work where our biosecurity officers are able to then come in and deliver the pest control days.

It's a really great partnership as well. So Landcare, it's a movement and it's about bringing people, it's about driving change.

Together we share the same stakeholders, we share the same desire for impact.

If volunteers are doing this work on behalf of government, it's not only government that gets tangible benefits to environmental outcomes, but it's also the intangible benefits of a more connected community.