Meet the regional town pioneering community-led business models

Country towns across Australia are quickly turning their fortunes around by coming up with innovative solutions for existential crises.

Transcript

00:00 I'm here in Yakandanda, a small town of just 2,000 people,

00:03 half an hour south of the New South Wales

00:05 and Victorian border.

00:06 In 2002, the impending closure of the local petrol station

00:09 galvanized seven locals to pull their money

00:12 and ship in to buy the servo.

00:14 The community rallied around this project,

00:16 developing what is now known

00:17 as the Yakandanda Community Development Company,

00:20 which today has more than 650 local shareholders.

00:23 - One of the reasons why co-ops form,

00:25 or one of the many reasons, is market failure.

00:28 This is where services, economies that are based

00:32 on the market are no longer able

00:34 to deliver particular needs.

00:37 And we see that with farmers, for example,

00:39 who set up their own agricultural processing for milk.

00:43 And this is also what happens here.

00:47 People, the services leaving,

00:50 and they had set up basically co-ops themselves

00:55 to try and solve that need.

00:57 And because co-ops generally don't,

00:59 you're not paying for investors who live outside the town,

01:02 having to give them shares and all this sort of stuff.

01:04 You can run it on a much more community-focused basis,

01:08 plow the money back into the community

01:10 and this sort of stuff as well.

01:12 - When the old petrol station was no longer viable,

01:14 they chipped in to buy the modern servo behind me.

01:17 And the funds from this business now support local projects

01:19 such as the newspaper, the Yakity Yak,

01:22 local sporting clubs, and most importantly,

01:24 the push for Yakandanda to become

01:25 Australia's first totally renewable town.

01:28 (upbeat music)

01:31 [BLANK_AUDIO]