David Barrow - Trustee
David is an experienced and valued communications professional, first with many years involvement in the central
government sector, but now in the community and voluntary sector. He is passionate about technology-especially the web as a key business tool for any organisation.
David is currently Communications & Development Manager for the NZ Federation of Voluntary Welfare Organisations. As a national umbrella organisation, NZFVWO identifies and focuses on issues that are important to the sector and does something about them. He sees strong parallels between the Trust and NZFVWO's work in advancing sector ICT.
In his current role, David promotes a number of ICT capacity-building initiatives and is keen to facilitate awareness about and access to ICT tools to the benefit of all sector groups.
David sees his new role with the Trust as one where he can now more actively focus on sector ICT proficiency. He is active in exploring with government and other players ways to grow sector ICT competence and how problems might be better addressed via dedicated strategy and funding.
He is also a strong believer in bringing training and skill development opportunities to community organisations. David has already played a key role in the development of Wellington ICT's e-Engage Your Community conferencing model and is now rolling-out the first national community & voluntary sector ICT conference in 2011.
He acknowledges that the speed of technology developments has opened up a veritable wave of opportunities, initiatives and issues for using ICT in the community sector. The costs of this innovation in terms of money, time and skill that are required to use it effectively present us with considerable challenges. The good news is that we can all use these technologies and we don't have to feel submerged by these waves of new technology, but can actually use them to our advantage.
David is an active member of the NFP CIO Forum in Wellington and is the founder of Comm2Comms-groups for sector communicators in both Wellington and Auckland aimed at advancing, learning and sharing for more effective sector communications. He is co-presenter of Collaborative Voices, a monthly Access Radio programme for the community & voluntary sector.
David has two married daughters, one grandson and has a male partner of 20 years. He is passionate about opera and has sung with the Chapman Tripp NZ Opera Chorus for over 20 years. He is also reasonably fluent in Italian.