Country Universities Centre - Western Riverina

About

Regional and rural communities all experience a similar problem: how do we ensure our youth and wider community have access to quality post-school opportunities and networks. Cooma is small country town with a population of 7,000 people, and its closest university and major city is over an hour’s drive away. The Cooma community wanted to create a solution that would support its local students to achieve their educational aspirations, and to inject knowledge and qualifications into the local workforce. So, in 2013 Snowy Hydro Ltd and Cooma Monaro Shire Council (as it was then known as) along with key community members, jointly funded the establishment of the Cooma Universities Centre. In 2014, Snowy Hydro gifted the Centre to the Cooma community, and the Cooma Universities Centre became a charitable, incorporated, not-for-profit organisation run by a community Board of Directors. The Centre operated for five years without any government funding with Snowy Hydro Ltd and the Snowy Monaro Shire Council continuing their support. During this time, the NSW Government recognised the impact of the Centre on the local community and provided seed funding to expand our model into five regional communities in NSW. In 2017, we re-branded to “Country Universities Centre” with the Cooma Universities Centre changing their name to “CUC Snowy Monaro”, and our incredible journey to change the future of regional education began. CUC Far West in Broken Hill and CUC Goulburn were officially opened in 2018, and have supported over 200 students in each of their Centres. In late 2018, we were fortunate to have been successful in obtaining Federal funding for our current and establishing Centres under the federal Regional University Centres program. This program has placed the study hub model in a national spotlight, with RUCs emerging in every state across the country, all developed for their local community by their local community. In 2019 we established CUC Clarence Valley in Grafton, CUC North West in Narrabri and Leeton, and CUC Western Riverina in Griffith and Leeton. In October 2019, we also smashed our dream milestone of supporting 1,000 regional students! Based on success, the NSW Government injected another round of seed-funding into our model to establish a further five CUCs in regional NSW.