Webinar - Residents Committees

View HERE

The first Education Centre Webinar was held on:

Thursday, October 19th, 2023

This webinar was designed exclusively for residents of retirement villages in NSW in response to the growing number of questions and concerns the RVRA receives each year on the role, formation and conduct of Committees.

In preparing for this webinar, we reviewed those enquiries, applied the relevant laws and, in collaboration with industry and government, offer a range of resources for our members and all NSW village residents.

The Webinar is moderated by James Wiltshire of The DCM Group and supported with funding from the NSW Department of Fair Trading. In his introduction, Craig Bennett, President of the RVRA, commented on the role of the newly formed Retirement Village Education Centre as a major project that is “transforming the RVRA in its ability to better serve the sector in its role of providing advice, information and advocacy, in a significantly more complicated environment.”

Some 14% of the members’ calls for assistance that the RVRA receive are about the issues confronting residents, managers, operators and Resident Committees. Since a major role of the Residents Committee is to provide a conduit for information to flow between Management and residents, Residents Committee issues are generally ones that affect the whole village community.

A panel comprising Diane Hart (Vice President, RVRA), Jim Gibbons (Past President, RVRA), Roger Pallant (Secretary, RVRA) and Aileen Stewart (Director, Senior Living Mediation) discusses a variety of problems with particular focus on Residents Committee transparency and conduct. The webinar concludes with information on where to find information and resources when things go wrong.

The role of Residents Committees, how they are established, and the responsibilities of the Committee members, were the focus of the Education Centre’s first rollout of videos and their accompanying Resource Sheets. This webinar adds to those resources by addressing some of the common issues that arise in the interactions between Residents Committees and residents and Operators.