Following on from yesterday’s blast from the past HeartBeat re the hard rubbish collection in Box Hill many moons ago ………………..

We received an online donation of $1000 dollars today. One of our Team Servants ’16 runners had $50 donated to their running page. The parents of one of our resos committed $10,000 to some beautifying of an outdoor area at Hamer that requires some beautifying for resos to enjoy more fully. All this today. This takes me back to the days of the early 2000s and to Warren’s now infamous Shark Graph. We had no money. Like ….. NONE!! Richard Horne ran our accounts at that time ….. I used to sit down with him every second Tuesday morning and we would look at the figures together. The typical conversation was led off by Richard with ‘Ok Matt, we have $53,000 of bills to pay ….. and $4,200 to pay them with. What do we pay first?’ Halcyon days? No, most definitely not!! But I do believe that they were instrumental days in setting us up to be who we are today as it helped us to understand why we thought we had a unique and very special model of community housing; that we had something that was worth fighting for rather than taking our bat and ball and going home.

Having successfully acquired our full suite of ATO concessions in, I guess, the mid to late noughties, I remember well the first $1000 donation that came in. It felt like a game-changer. It probably WAS a game-changer at that stage of things.

And here we are in 2016 …….. where days like today with money and gifts coming in to us are now the norm. We have come a long, long way from those days. However, we would be wise to never take these things for granted. On each and every occasion we are treated as a trusted beneficiary of others income we should be as delighted as that first gift of $1000 many moons ago.

Still reading dear reader? If so, the only place to finish this HeartBeat is to recognize the quite enormous efforts that have gone into our finances over many years, particularly by Warren, but with the help of numerous others too. Great care with our finances over these years ensure that we are still here today to be the blessed beneficiaries of days like today.