Better Together is the idea underneath almost everything I do through Social Gain. It came from something I kept seeing: good people doing good work beside each other, often for the same community, but each organisation creating its own event, campaign, audience, sponsorship ask and resources from scratch.
In a regional community, that matters. The same people are often being asked to attend, speak, volunteer, promote, sponsor and participate, and the pool isn’t endless. Better Together asks a different question: what happens if we start with what we have in common, bring the right people together, and let everyone contribute what they already do well?
Our region doesn’t have a shortage of good people. Sometimes, we just make it too hard for them to find each other. Better Together connects the people, organisations, businesses, artists and services already doing good work and amplifies what already exists rather than automatically creating something new.
That is important socially as well as practically. Connection, culture and participation are not the decorative bits around community wellbeing. They are part of how people build belonging, find information, access support, discover opportunities and feel that they have a place in the community. Social Gain exists to strengthen those connections between people, culture and community.
At its heart, Better Together is simple: bring good people together to do great things, and make the connections useful long after the event is over.
The women’s festivals
The clearest expression of Better Together has been the women’s festivals. The first Dubbo Women’s Festival grew from a conversation with Lorna Brennan, who was organising an event for Mental Health Month. I had been wanting to bring one of my former Sydney Writer clients, Susanne North, to Dubbo to speak about menopause and women’s wellbeing.
One conversation became another, and before long we were asking a much bigger question: why were we all creating separate International Women’s Day events, approaching many of the same women, speakers, businesses, venues, sponsors and audiences, when we could bring those efforts together?
That became the festival. It wasn’t about one organisation owning International Women’s Day, and it wasn’t about everybody abandoning what they already did. It was about creating shared infrastructure where many people could bring their piece, reach a wider audience and strengthen what other people were doing at the same time.
That distinction matters. One of the problems Social Gain is trying to address is fragmentation: capable people and organisations working in silos, competing for the same limited resources and often trying to reach the same end users. Better Together creates an alternative — a shared place where effort can accumulate rather than continually starting again.
Every Woman
The festival began as a one-day event in 2024 and has continued to grow and evolve. Health services could bring health expertise. Artists could create. Businesses could support something meaningful in their community. Community organisations could connect with women they wanted to reach. Speakers could share their knowledge and lived experience.
Women could come for a conversation, a performance, a workshop, a dance, a market, a film, breakfast, art, or simply because somebody they knew invited them. Nobody had to do everything, and everybody added something.
Because those contributions sat alongside each other, something larger emerged. The festival became more than a collection of events. It became a place where relationships, ideas, conversations and opportunities could collide.
A woman might come for music and discover a local service. Someone attending a health conversation might meet an artist. A business owner might discover a community project she wants to support. A young woman might see someone from her own region doing something she hadn’t imagined was possible. Someone might simply meet another person. Those are small moments, but socially they matter. They build connections between people and groups who may not otherwise meet.
As the festival has grown, so has the idea. What began as the Dubbo Women’s Festival has evolved into the Orana Every Woman Festival, creating room for women across Dubbo and the towns, properties and communities of the wider Orana region.
The principle remains the same: start with what is already here, find the people already doing good work, create the common ground and make it easier for people to participate. Give different people different ways in, use creativity to make difficult conversations easier to enter, share audiences, resources, stories and opportunities, and make sure contribution is visible.
For Social Gain, the social impact is not simply attendance. The longer-term aim is greater connection and less isolation, better access to wellbeing information and support, stronger relationships between community organisations, more opportunities for regional artists and creatives, and less duplication of effort.
The aim isn’t for Social Gain to own everything. The aim is to create the conditions where more people can find each other and make something stronger together.
Keeping the connection going
This is where Better Together becomes bigger than an events philosophy. A festival can create an intense burst of connection, but Social Gain’s aim is to make some of that value continue throughout the year.
That is why the Every Woman Festival connects with The Orana Woman, stories and profiles, The Diary and Safer Sisters. The event creates a physical gathering; the wider platform keeps people connected to information, people, services and opportunities between festivals.
The same thinking sits behind Made Out Here and Creative to Purpose. Artists need audiences and opportunities. Young regional creatives need visible, paid pathways into work. Communities need easier ways to discover what is already happening around them. Instead of treating those as completely separate problems, Social Gain looks for the connections between them.
That is the deeper Better Together model: shared infrastructure rather than isolated interventions.
It doesn’t only happen at festivals
Better Together runs through other Social Gain projects too. The Moment Lounge brought creativity, wellbeing, local stories and participation into one shared space. Taco’Bout creates an informal way to have conversations people might otherwise avoid. Dubbo’s Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever used something joyful and slightly ridiculous to bring people together around grief, connection and cancer fundraising. Every Woman Circles give existing conversations and trusted local people another way to connect women across the region.
The projects look different because communities and subjects are different, but the method stays the same: listen first, look at what already exists, find the people who already have trust, notice where effort is being duplicated, and create a reason to come together.
Then make participation easy. Let people contribute what they are good at. Use creativity, humour and humanity. Credit people properly. Share the platform. And leave behind more connections than you started with.
More than attendance
For me, social impact isn’t just counting how many people walked through the door. Numbers matter, but they only tell part of the story.
It is also whether someone found a service they didn’t know existed, whether an artist gained a new audience or paid opportunity, whether two organisations began working together instead of separately, whether a woman felt more connected to her community, whether a young person saw a pathway for themselves, and whether the relationships created through one project continued afterwards.
That is why Social Gain looks at reach and participation, festival attendance and repeat attendance, use of wellbeing information and referrals, artists and makers engaged, paid opportunities created, youth participation and employment outcomes, and the proportion of trading revenue reinvested into community benefit.
If Better Together is working, over time we should be able to see the difference: more connection, stronger local networks, greater participation, more visible pathways, less unnecessary duplication, and more community energy being spent building things together.
Community doesn’t fit into neat boxes
We have become very good at broadcasting and surprisingly rusty at being together. Funding, institutions and organisations often divide community life into separate boxes: health, arts, youth, business, tourism, social services, culture and community development.
Real life doesn’t work that way, and neither should community-building. A woman experiencing isolation might also be a small-business owner, an artist, a carer, a volunteer, somebody new to town and somebody looking for friendship. A young person looking for work might also need confidence, connection, mentoring and somewhere to belong. Community problems rarely arrive neatly labelled according to a government funding category.
Better Together deliberately works in the space between those boxes. It recognises that healthier and happier communities are not created by one service, one organisation or one event. They are built through networks of people, places, opportunities, culture and care.
Sometimes the most valuable thing isn’t another program. It is introducing two people who should already know each other, sharing an audience instead of competing for one, giving an existing idea a bigger platform, making someone’s good work easier to find, or creating somewhere people actually want to be.
That is the social impact I am interested in: not doing everything ourselves, but strengthening the connections that allow a community to do more together.
When we’re Better Together, everyone wins.
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