What Clubs Lose When Community Work Gets Its Own Department
Aug 28, 2026
Community engagement in registered clubs works best when knowledge about it is distributed across every department, not concentrated in a single coordinator or team. I've spent over 30 years in hospitality, and I've landed on a conclusion I don't think enough club leaders have reached yet: professionalising community work solves a resourcing problem while creating a new one. It removes the reason for the rest of the venue to stay informed.
The shift is real, and it's overdue
Across 2026, more clubs are moving community give-back out of the informal category and into proper structure. Dedicated coordinators. Partnerships teams. Formal grant committees with real budgets attached, instead of whatever was left over after the bistro refit. For years this work sat on the side desk of an already stretched operations manager, done between everything else, and it's finally getting the resourcing and seniority it should have had a decade ago.
That's genuinely good progress. Clubs are better resourced to run bigger, more consistent community programs than they were five years ago, and the people doing that work now have the time and mandate to do it properly. None of what follows is an argument against that shift. It's an argument about what has to happen alongside it.
What gets lost in the handover
Before a club had a dedicated community role, everyone on the floor had a rough idea what was involved, because there was no one else to lead the way. Ask five staff members what the club actually does for the local area, and you'd get five slightly different, half-complete answers. Inconsistent, yes. But distributed. Every department had some version of the story, because every department had, at some point, been the one fielding the question.
Once that work has an owner, a specific person or team whose job title says community, the rest of the venue stops needing to be involved as much. That's efficient in the way a specialist function is supposed to be efficient. It's also how a club's community story moves from being everywhere, unevenly, to being somewhere, precisely.
Ask the community coordinator today and you'll get a well-briefed, accurate answer. Ask the person on the gaming floor, the bistro, or reception, the people standing in front of members most nights, and you'll probably get a shrug. That's the predictable result of centralising a job that used to be everyone's problem.
Why this compounds with a multigenerational workforce
This gap matters more now than it would have a decade ago, because clubs are running the most generationally diverse workforce in the industry's history, often four or five generations on a single roster. A new starter used to absorb the club's community story slowly, by working alongside senior staff over years. That transmission model relied on long tenure and close proximity between experienced and new staff.
Tenure is shorter now, and the workforce turns over faster across every age group on the roster. A nineteen-year-old on their first hospitality job isn't going to pick up the club's community history through years of standing next to the same senior duty manager, because neither the years nor, often, that staff member will still be there. The old transmission model needed time it no longer has, at exactly the moment a club has more staff, of more different ages, needing to receive that story in the first place.
What actually fixes it
The answer isn't to undo the professionalisation. It's to treat the community team's knowledge as something built to circulate, not something built to be housed. That means the coordinator's job includes actively pushing information back out through onboarding, team briefings, and the way managers talk about the club day to day, not just running the programs themselves. It means every new starter learns one concrete thing the club does for its community in their first week, regardless of which department they've joined. It means middle managers are equipped to repeat that story accurately, on the floor, without needing to check with the community team first.
This is the same principle I unpack from a different angle in this week's episode of The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast, The Real Reason Your Community Work Isn't Sticking. In it, I look at why even people who've worked adjacent to a club's community funding for years can remain unaware of its scale, and why that gap is a leadership habit problem rather than a marketing one. The professionalisation trend and that internal storytelling gap are the same issue, showing up in two different parts of a club's operation.
The leadership question worth asking
If you're building out a community or partnerships function, the venues doing this well aren't the ones with the strongest coordinator. They're the ones whose leadership treats that coordinator's knowledge as a resource for the whole team to draw on, built into how every manager operates, not a specialist function that exists apart from everyone else's job.
This is exactly the capability I build with leadership teams through the Middle Management Movement, Executive Leaders Movement, and Leadership Coaching, helping clubs keep specialist knowledge moving through every department instead of settling in the team that generated it. You can explore all three at www.michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms.
And to catch this week's full podcast episode, visit the link below.
