“In leaving my role, I thank you for your support in my leadership of VWT and the organisation.”

Dear friends,

Warmest greetings. I hope that my letter finds you coping well with the final stages of winter. The first signs of blossom suggest spring is close at hand.

As you will be aware, I have departed from the role of Executive Director (effective end of July) after twenty-eight years in the job. This is my final communication to you, and it is about gratitude and hope.

I am immensely grateful to have had the opportunity to lead the Victorian Women’s Trust. I joined the organisation in November 1996. It was only eleven years old. Having been a supporter and follower since its inception in 1985, I knew its potential was there to be realised.

It has been a great privilege to help grow VWT as a fiercely independent, vibrant feminist organisation, to dare to do, to savour the wins and to witness the benefits from collaboration and partnership. The Trust is a creative, brave and resilient force for change. Values of integrity, respect, excellence and honesty are deeply enculturated. I am proud to have been a part of this evolution.

I have drawn on the best small staff you could bring together: people sharing the passion, bringing their own intellectual capacity to the tasks at hand. People at ease, and indeed flourishing, within a collegial model. The same can be said of the Board and its leaders over the time.

Over these past three decades, we have been able to bring good ideas into reality because you and our many other donors and supporters have generously provided us with the wherewithal to do what we so ached to do — change the world to be a better place for girls, women and gender diverse peoples.

The Trust has helped change things for the better. The social, economic and political landscape is slowly and inexorably moving towards full gender equality. But we are not there yet and even when equality is close to being assured, vigilance will be the order of the day.

I am ready to leave this fine organisation. To coin a phrase, it’s time. And I am truly delighted that we have found a very special person in Kirsten Abernethy to be only VWT’s fifth Executive Director in forty years. New chapters to a fine novel await.

We stand on the shoulders of giants. Feminist progress is never about one person or a single organisation. Generations of Australian women have worked tirelessly to achieve the degree of gender equality many can now take as given. But the Trust remains a unique and important vehicle for social change and long may it continue to do so. Indeed, that’s why we set up the Equal Futures Endowment Fund — to ensure the financial capacity into the long-term future to take on new, imaginative activities and campaigns.

In leaving my role, I thank you for your support in my leadership of VWT and the organisation. I thank you for the privilege of getting to know you, work with you, and to have put so many runs on the gender equality scoreboard together.

Best wishes,

Mary Crooks AO