New postal service at Flowerdale Community House

WITH the closure of the Hazeldene General Store and its Australia Post Service, Flowerdale Community House has taken over the reins, so the community won’t miss out from this important service.

It’s been quite a challenge for the Flowerdale Community House team to get the service up an running on August 1.
Rebekah Grant, Flowerdale Community House Coordinator said, “It’s been a bit of a whirlwind. I haven’t had time to breathe.”

She explained the process of getting the postal service to Flowerdale Community House.

“Hazeldene store shut down and we wanted to save the service of the post office for the community so we tried to figure out if we could sustainably do it and then we put a call out for volunteers to see if they could potentially manage it that way.

We had a really great response from the community with that, and we were able to decide yes, this is viable,” she said.

“So, we made arrangements with Auspost and talked to Sue from the Hazeldene store and made sure we could make it happen. It’s all been very busy since August 1 and even before that to make it all happen. Now we have a limited service, we are a CPA we are not an LPO.

A CPA is a community postal agent, it’s smaller than an LPO which is a local post office. A CPA doesn’t do banking and bill payments; you need to go to an LPO for that. The community house collects parcels and mail for the local people, and you can come in and get your parcels and your mail. They also sell stamps and pre-paid envelopes.

Rebekah said, “We have 16 volunteers who have put their hands up so it’s an incredible response.

We do have to go through a bit of a process at the moment. We are holding the fort as we are getting the volunteers ready.

“Australia post is doing all the police checks etcetera and training everyone up. So, at this stage my committee and I are holding the fort at the….

Image credits: Flowerdale Community House