We build the conditions that make investment land and last in regional, rural and remote communities
Grants come and go. Readiness stays.
Investment arrives, work happens, funding stops, progress is lost. Familiar story?
How is this different?
Funding finds its way to regional communities. But what happens when the funding stops?
Projects switch off. People are looking for new jobs. And clients are explaining their challenges to yet another service.
Entrenched disadvantage cannot continue when a community is ready. Why? Because you can’t unsee readiness. It’s the clarity, the connectedness, the capacity, the collaboration that will not let it survive.
But in the absence of readiness, any kind of investment can simply slide off the top.
Is your regional community ready? Or is it still chasing down the same old problems with endless grants?
Kerry and Chad, in leading Kempsey through the Ready Communities program, have absolutely transformed the conversation around positive place-based change here in the Macleay Valley.
Father Jesse poole
Minister, Anglican Parish of Kempsey
About Ready Communities
Who are we?
Ready Communities was founded by Kerry Grace and Dr. Chad Renando in 2023, brought together by a shared frustration with the way regional investment often fails the communities it’s meant to serve.
Between them, Kerry and Chad bring decades of on-the-ground experience in community development, social impact and the science of readiness. What makes Ready Communities different is that we don’t parachute in with answers. We sit alongside communities, work with what’s already there, and leave when the conditions for lasting change are in place.
What is readiness?
Readiness is like tilling the soil, getting prepared before planting.
Before investment lands, before projects get delivered, before partnerships form, there are conditions that determine whether any of it will stick.
Ready Communities works with regional communities to nurture and embody five key enabling factors of readiness creating clarity, finding new ways to connect, exploring capability, capacity and collaborative opportunities and expanding opportunities for advocacy.
People in regional communities are already doing great work. Readiness amplifies it.
Who do we work with?
Is your regional community ready?
Ready Communities works with the people who show up for their communities. Community members and organisations, business owners, local government and not for profits who are ready to move beyond the next grant and build something that lasts.
Often people we work with refer to their community as the ‘gap in the map’. Communities that feel under serviced, and over consulted.
We’re not here to tell communities what they need. We work alongside the people who already know their community best and help them build the conditions for change that sticks.
If that sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you.
What this (Ready Macleay) did was both do basic community development, community connection, economic development as well as marketing the town to a broader audience. It brought a whole range of things together through a 12 month process.
Craig Milburn
(former) General Manager, Kempsey Shire Council (to 2024)