Lindy Allen
Lindy has spent most of her working life in the creative industries in both a regional and metropolitan context. From a stage career in music and comedy in the late 70s and early 80s, she moved to roles in business and administration in the health and environment sectors. She relocated to Mallacoota in Far-East Gippsland in the early 1990s with her family in order to give her children a sense of the community responsibility that accompanies acceptance within a small, isolated and self-supporting village. Lindy is a great believer in maintaining cultural diversity through dialogue and respect. At a local level, communities function best when they are supported, through skills development and access to information and other resources, to make their own decisions. Her work has been grounded in the belief that there are three stages to the development of community awareness in humans: an early realisation of what is 'mine', the acceptance that some things are 'yours and mine' and the knowledge that the things worth striving for belong to the broader community. Lindy believes that working in community-based cultural organisations has been a privilege as it has given her the opportunity to contribute to a sector that is strongly focussed on improving what is 'ours.'
Lindy was appointed to her current role as Director of Regional Arts Victoria in April 2004. Prior to joining RAV she was awarded an Asialink Arts Management residency and spent two months in Yogyakarta and travelling through Java and Bali, teaching arts management and researching the nature of community arts practice in an unfunded environment.