As one of the Facebook admins for Coledale CommUnity Notice Board, 77-year-old tech-savvy retiree Ainslie Collison is connecting locals and navigating online challenges.
The Coledale page is a private one with 2.2K members and more than 250 posts a month. It was established in October 2016 and Ainslie joined as an admin in December 2022. With group founder Stacey Leigh handling nearly 20 pages, Ainslie embraced the chance to help.
“Well, I feel like I am helping out the community and it’s a way I can do it without leaving the house,” Ainslie said.
“I mean, some people are doing Meals on Wheels and this and that, but I’m sort of helping out in a way.
“I feel like if I don’t do it, who’s going to do it?”
Ainslie, a retired secretary-word processor for Standards Australia, integrated staying up to date on modern technology into her daily routine during her working years.
“To me, if I didn’t learn something new every day, it would be a wasted day,” Ainslie said.
“I got really involved in learning how all these programs work and all that sort of thing.”
In 2010, Ainslie relocated to the Illawarra where she continues to enjoy and use her digital skills, whether that’s playing games on her phone or helping fellow residents at her over-50s village in Fairy Meadow.
“I spend a lot of time with technology,” Ainslie said. “A lot of the people around me know nothing about it, so if they’ve got a problem, they come to me.”
Working as an unpaid volunteer admin for the Coledale group and 13 other community pages – with a total of almost 74,000 members – Ainslie puts in about two to three hours of work a day in managing these forums.
Her primary responsibility is to act as a gatekeeper, ensuring that the group remains a community for locals by carefully managing its membership.
“It’s really checking out the people before they join to really make sure that they are locals.
“We don’t like people swearing and abusing other people, so if anybody starts coming up with that sort of thing, they will automatically get banned.”
One of the biggest problems with social media today is spam and scams, she said.
“So many do not answer questions but if they put an address or say they want to join ‘this lovely group’ you immediately get suspicious,” Ainslie said.
“Usually they are scammers from overseas.
“The groups need to be private to check every applicant and still some get through.”
Through her time as an admin, Ainslie has witnessed the value of these Facebook pages as a good way of alerting the community to what’s going on and creating awareness of local issues.
“I didn’t realise there was so much theft and vandalism until it started coming up in the groups,” Ainslie said.
“I suppose the fact that people have more security cameras, they want to tell everybody what they saw on the camera.”
She has also appreciated the community’s ability to unite for regional issues.
“It seems like the fact that everybody’s getting together to try and stop these wind turbines out in our ocean,” Ainslie said.
“I think that’s positive that people are getting on board and getting together.”
Anyone in the Wollongong area seeking updates on the Coledale community is warmly welcomed and encouraged to join. If interested, here's the link.
