How Hospitality Leaders Build Safer, Stronger Communities

There’s a version of our industry that involves dining and entertainment, loyalty programs and loyalty points. And then there’s a version that shows up on a rainy Sunday night when a woman has nowhere else to go.

The registered club industry has always been more than a hospitality business. But what I heard in my recent conversation with Debbie Dickson made me think hard about just how much is being asked of our people — and how willingly, and beautifully, they are rising to it.

Debbie is the Marketing Manager at The Ary Toukley, on NSW’s Central Coast, where she has spent over 12 years leading marketing, entertainment, and community engagement. She also serves as Vice Chair of the Clubs for Community United Against Violence Committee, a statewide body formed in 2023 to drive domestic and family violence prevention across the club industry.

When the Data Lands on Your Doorstep

In 2017, Debbie received a call she wasn’t expecting. NSW Police had identified the five highest domestic violence hotspots in the state. The Ary’s community was at number three. Today, alarmingly, it sits at number one.

The initial ask from Clubs NSW was simple: display support resources on toilet doors and in-venue screens. Debbie’s response was not.

“We’re the biggest organisation in this community. These are our people — our staff, our members, our family, our friends. This is happening in our backyard. We have a responsibility to do more than stick up a poster.” — Debbie Dickson, The Ary Toukley

That instinct — to treat a statistic as a call to action — is what separates venues that talk about community from venues that build it.

Start With the People Inside Your Building

Before The Ary did anything visible, they did something internal. Debbie connected with local domestic violence expert Danielle Habib and brought her in to train the entire staff — from 18-year-olds to 65-year-olds. Then they opened the doors. Central Coast club CEOs, HR managers, and marketing managers were all invited in. Local police joined the room. The Ary funded and hosted it.

They followed that with a radio campaign — club CEOs, all men at the time, recording messages standing up and speaking out against domestic violence as a collective. They walked in public, behind the club banner, in the White Ribbon Walk. They put resources on the backs of toilet doors and the White Ribbon on their front doors.

Think about the reach. The Ary has 80 staff and 18,000 members. Multiply those members by the people they bring, their children, their networks, and you are talking about hundreds of thousands of people whose lives could be touched by a single conversation, a single poster, a single purple shirt worn on a Friday.

The Moment That Changed Everything

COVID pulled the wheels off much of what The Ary had built. The reopening consumed everyone. The DV initiatives stalled.

Then, on a rainy Sunday night, a young duty manager called Debbie at 9:30pm. A woman had fled her home and walked into the club. Distressed. Nowhere to go.

“She came to us,” Debbie told me, “because clubs are open later than most other organisations. We’re full of people. We’re well lit. We have security. She surrounded herself with people because it was a safety zone.”

They got her a cup of tea. They got her a phone. They connected her with support. And Debbie got back on the phone to their DV expert and started rebuilding what they’d let lapse. This time, they put it on paper. They took it to the board. They made it official.

From Good Intentions to a Real Plan

The Ary’s Domestic Violence Action Plan isn’t a document that lives in a drawer. It is a living, breathing commitment that shows up in daily operations.

Staff training is paid, structured, and ongoing. EscaBags — essential kits for people fleeing domestic violence, containing toiletries and even children’s toys — are stocked at reception. Support leaflets sit on the front desk and on the back of every toilet door. The club co-hosted the Walk Against Domestic Violence with the Central Coast Domestic Violence Council, with guest speakers including a local DV unit commander and a Clubs NSW representative.

And then there are the purple shirts. Every Friday, every staff member wears purple in solidarity with survivors. The shirts carry the 1800RESPECT number, so anyone who spots one has an instant gateway to support. Over 22 clubs statewide are now involved.

“I had several staff members stop me afterwards and say how proud they are to work at an organisation that’s taking this stance. We’re not just sponsoring a sporting team. We’re trying to create social change and build a safer community.” — Debbie Dickson, The Ary Toukley

The club has also committed to a three-year school education program in partnership with Catholic Care, delivered to Year 9 students at a local high school that has the highest out-of-home rate for teenagers in the state. Teaching young people what healthy relationships look like, before patterns form, is prevention at its most powerful.

Building a Movement, Not Just a Moment

When Debbie attended a Catalyst for Change forum at Doltone House last year, she found a room full of clubs all doing remarkable work independently. Education programs, emergency shelter partnerships, fundraising walks. All of it in silos.

At lunch, Debbie turned to Arely Carrion (then with Mounties Group, now with Clubs NSW) and said: “What are you going to do with all this? We need a committee.”

That committee now exists. Clubs for Community United Against Violence brings together clubs across NSW with a combined reach of 14,000 member clubs statewide. It has recently become an incorporated association to ensure its longevity. A resource website, funded by DOOLEYS Lidcombe, is in development. Standardised training programs are being built with Kempsey RSL and Learning for Good, so every club, regardless of size, can access quality education.

The vision is clear: every club educates its staff, stocks its resources, and stands with its community. United. Not in silos.

A Different Way to Measure Success

Our industry spends an enormous amount of time thinking about guest experience. Mystery shops, NPS scores, online reviews. We obsess over the moments between arrival and departure. But Debbie’s work surfaces a question I think we’ve been too comfortable not asking: who do we actually include in that definition of “guest”?

The woman who fled to The Ary on a rainy Sunday night wasn’t a member. She wasn’t there for dinner. She had no money and no plan. But the club’s response to her — a cup of tea, a phone, a safe place to sit — was arguably the most important hospitality it delivered that week.

What strikes me about the clubs industry’s approach to DV is that it has stumbled onto something most corporates never reach: the idea that your physical presence in a community is itself a form of service. Clubs are open late, well lit, full of people, staffed by trained humans, and embedded in the suburb. They were not designed to be refuges. But they are perfectly built to be one. That’s not a coincidence. It’s an asset that carries a responsibility.

There’s also a harder conversation that Debbie’s work points toward. Most hospitality venues are organised to respond when something happens. A duty manager gets a call. A security guard steps in. A pamphlet directs someone to a hotline. That is reactive, and it matters. But what Debbie has built at The Ary — school programs, structured staff education, a public stance worn on a shirt every Friday — is proactive. It’s trying to prevent harm before it occurs, not just manage the fallout. That’s a genuinely different leadership posture, and it’s rare.

The clubs that understand this aren’t just doing good work. They’re building the kind of deep community trust that no marketing campaign can manufacture. In 30 years in this industry, I have become quite certain that the venues people stay loyal to across generations are the ones that showed up when it was hard, not just when it was easy.

Debbie Dickson has been showing up since 2017. Persistently. Without fanfare. And the community she serves is safer for it.

🎙 Listen to the full conversation with Debbie Dickson

The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast — available now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.