The first instalment of Jeanette’s two-part interview was published in last week’s Mail on June 26.
One of the founding members of the Castlemaine Community Investment Co-operative (the folks who recently bought The Hub), Jeanette was one of five recipients to receive the 2026 Paul Ramsey Foundation Fellowship. She will spend the next 18 months utilising the $250,000, 18-month fellowship to help write a manual to help other groups understand the process for cooperative investments, to help address disadvantage and to look at system barriers.
Initially, when the co-op first started, Jeanette was only planning to volunteer an hour of her time to help with an investment lodging…
“I’ve really enjoyed it – finding my tribe to do something you all believe in is a really great thing,” she said.
“We ran this successful campaign – a bunch of volunteers, and suddenly we got our feet under the desks of a big building, and everything goes crazy! Be careful of your success – it’s a really big, complicated baby!”
After being contacted by 45 different groups wanting “serious” support to help get projects off the ground, Jeanette realised they needed to put something solid in place to share their findings and take the pressure off the volunteers who were starting to feel overwhelmed by the requests coming in, so she applied to the fellowship.
Three months in, and Jeanette is working hard to create additional partnerships for The Hub. They’ve teamed up with the Child Care Co-operative, which will use the garden for classes with children and an intergenerational gardening program with Dhelkaya Health.
They have also partnered with Connecting Country, who, in return for storing the tools in the shed at the back of The Hub, will set up a revegetation library allowing people to borrow tools.
And the all-important questions:
Who are your dream dinner guests? When I moved here, my father told me that one of our ancestors was a woman, Mary Cleaver, who had a little shrine in the Welshmans Reef Cemetery as the first pioneer. She was 55 years old and travelled across from Perth. Her husband had died, and she had two adult sons. She came across her by herself with menopause, across the continent! So, I’d like to have dinner with her. The other one is John Deeble, the guy who wrote Medicare. He mentored me for a while, and he was the smartest, funniest, happiest person I’d ever met. I’d probably like to have a conversation with him at some point again.
What are your philosophies? Be kind and fight back. Social justice has always been a thing for me; I’ve always been the guy who cares about stuff. I find it ridiculously rewarding. I like people. I love hearing people’s stories. I love trying to wrestle with something like the projections. I feel really lucky.
What are you reading at the moment? Voluminous, boring annual reports. Nothing interesting. I have been reading some Substacks. There’s an American airline that has gone down, and someone put up a crowdsource to buy it back, and they’ve raised $371 million or something to buy this airline, and I’m loving that!
What hobbies do you enjoy? I really like gardening. I love Australian natives and I’m re-vegetating around our house. I love flowers, and I take photos of them and draw them. I get a lot of joy from being in nature and the crazy, beautiful, symmetrical world that is native flowers.
Finally, what do you love most about home? The Hub. I love being here, I love Joe, who owns the cafe, I love the community here. I love that whenever you come down here, there’s always someone to talk to and there’s always something going on. There are 19 tenants, but there are 562 members – so there’s always someone for me to talk to!