Bob Neville & Tingha Community Regeneration win new award

Congratulations to Bob Neville for winning the individual section of the NSW Building Inclusive Communities Award.

The photo shows left to right – State Premier Hon Barry O’Farrell, Bob Neville Tingha Regeneration Inc, Diane Torrens Chairperson Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress and Mr Tim Torrens.

The prize was awarded for his leadership of the Tingha Regeneration Program which is not only designed to rebuild the community, it also seeks to provide a model for many struggling communities throughout Australia.

My congratulations to Bob and those who have worked with him.

It seemed an appropriate time for me to pull together a few of the past posts I have written about Tingha:

• Back in March 2007 in New England's Poor Towns - a failure in public policy I referred to Tingha as one of the poor towns listed by Professor Vinson, Nearly all the NSW poor towns listed by Professor Vinson were in New England. My concern then as it is now lay in finding ways to turn this around.
• New England Australia's Chinese - Reference Post (30 March 2007) was a then consolidation post on the Chinese in New England. The Chinese form an important part of Tingha's history. Wing Hing Long & Co - Tingha (2 May 2008) deals with an exhibition on this Tingha store.
• The vanished Kamilaroi and the need for a new approach (16 August 2008) includes a photo of an Aboriginal family pea picking at Tingha.
• Tingha - a case study in community regeneration (February 16 2009) was the first story I wrote on Bob's work. This was followed by Belshaw’s World: Overcoming the curse of local self-interest (25 March 2009) Tingha Community Regeneration Continues (30 March 2009) and then Tingha Community Regeneration Project update (20 October 2009).

Actually, there are fewer there than I thought!. Still, if you look just at this list, you can see that I have been following Bob' work for a little while.