Clutha District Council strategic planning manager Larissa Brown is passionate about both southern communities and the rural sector, and likes to take a big-picture approach when it comes to their futures.
Mrs Brown was recently presented with chartered membership of the Institute of Directors at a function in Dunedin.
She was committed to developing her skills and playing a part in supporting those communities and rural industries step up and into the future.
Like many women, her governance journey began when her own children were young — at one stage, her three sons were under 4 — with the likes of the Waitahuna School Parent Teacher Association.
In her day job at the council, her work entailed supporting elected members and assisting with planning for the district and its communities — bringing information to those members to hopefully make good decisions and support good governance for the Clutha district.
She is a director of the Argyll Dairy Group farming operation in South Otago — which her home farm is now part of — which milks 2200 cows across three dairy farms and a support block, and supplies milk to both Fonterra and Danone Nutricia’s infant milk powder plant in Clydevale.
With a desire to also support her local community, she is a director on the community-owned Tuapeka Health Company.
She and her husband Hamish, with their now-teenage sons, run a sheep and beef farm near Lawrence, and Mrs Brown recently joined the Otago Federated Farmers executive team as dairy chairwoman.
Asked how she managed to juggle her various roles, Mrs Brown said with "very careful co-ordination and diary planning".
This year, she is also taking part in the Fonterra Governance Development Programme and the Agri-Women Development Trust’s (AWDT) Escalator programme.
It was "fantastic" to work with like-minded, positive people in the agricultural sector.
For her, positivity and integrity were important and she was a believer of collaboration and working together.
Cross-sector collaboration was "hugely important" not just in the primary sector but also wider industry, along with having a future focus.
She was full of praise for the AWDT and what it had done.
There had been "a ripple spread out right across the primary sector and beyond" from those women who had undergone its various programmes.
Her involvement began with an Understanding Your Family Business course.
City-based friends often said they loved how she could develop her own career in the country.
And that country lifestyle was always going to be where she was at.
"I’m never going anywhere. I love being on the farm ... with Hamish and the boys. This is my home base."
But she also relished being able to get involved with different things and "get around about the countryside".
"I really like driving on gravel roads ... that’s my happy place."
This weekend she was particularly looking forward to attending the Century Farm awards in Lawrence, acknowledging families who have been on the land for 100 years or more.
Her late father-in-law Russell Brown was the instigator of the programme and later its patron.
He heard of the initiative through some North American visitors and launched the programme in 2005, honouring its first group of families in 2006.
Hamish Brown was on the Century Farms committee.
Farming had been very traditional for such a long time but often it was the partnership that "makes it" — what women brought to the table in those farming businesses, she said.
Mrs Brown often felt guilty about not spending more time on the farm — she quipped that Valentines Day was spent doing romantic things like weighing lambs with her husband — but now she was more often working on the farming business, rather than directly in it.
Becoming involved with the Institute of Directors had been very beneficial.
What the organisation provided was "absolutely fantastic" and she recommended it to anybody, no matter where they were on their governance journey.
Otago Southland branch chairwoman Trish Oakley said chartered members committed time to developing their skills and knowledge to meet the high standards of governance set by the chartered designation.
She congratulated Otago-Southland’s newest chartered members — Mrs Brown, Frank O’Boyle and Bridget Tweed — and thanked them for their commitment to governance and continuous learning.
Mr O’Boyle, the infrastructure and environmental manager at South Port NZ, started his governance journey in 2018 when he joined not-for-profit organisation Calvary Hospital Southland Ltd.
He was recently elected chairman of Hawthorndale Care Village Ltd which is building a new $35 million aged-care village in Southland.
Mrs Tweed, FMG’s Otago area manager, lives on a farm at Waitahuna with her husband Luke and their four children.
After completing an agricultural commerce degree at Lincoln University, she has worked in various rural businesses gaining experience in rural finance, marketing and product management.
She is deputy chairwoman of Clutha Development, which is the economic development agency and also regional tourism organisation for the Clutha district, and a trustee on the Otago Community Trust.
