Lynn Mizen appointed RSL Victoria’s First Female Vice President
RSL Warragul Sub-Branch President Lynn Mizen was recently appointed as a Vice President of RSL Victoria’s State Executive, the first woman to be appointed to the position.
Lynn was born in the United Kingdom and migrated to Australia in 1980. She joined the Australian Army in 1989 and spent four years as an Operator in Information Systems and Cipher with 4 Signal Regiment in Queensland.
“I joined the RSL when I was still in the Army at Enoggera Barracks,” Lynn said. “There was a pretty large RSL not far from the barracks and it was a great place to go to get a good meal and socialise with other people from the base.”
After leaving the Army she moved to Warragul in 2004 where her father was a member of the local RSL
“At my father’s insistence I joined the Warragul RSL,” Lynn said. “And I have been a member there ever since.”
Lynn says that she does not think the broader community understand what it is like to have been in the armed services. By joining the RSL it gave her the opportunity to connect with people who understood what that life was like regardless of whether they had served overseas or not.
Lynn left Australia in the early 2000’s to pursue career opportunities overseas, including work with multi-national corporations like Unisys and BHP Billiton. She has decades of experience in the field of corporate governance and strategic planning.
This experience will be the vital to her new role as Vice President, with her primary responsibility leading Governance and Reform following an independent review into the organisation.
“The RSL is an organisation that is now over 100 years old,” she said.
“I think its first challenge is to recognise that it does have challenges, and to have the courage and mindset to do something about it.”
The Independent Review was conducted by Thoughtpost Governance and made a series of recommendations to modernise the organisation.
“We need to have an organisational structure that enables us to continue not just for now but for future generations because not much has changed within the organisation in 100 plus years. The world is a far different place from when the RSL was created.”
Lynn says that while the RSL needs to change it still plays a vital role within the community, particularly in regional areas.
“I think across the regions the RSL plays a very important role, especially in the smaller communities where they still want to have their ANZAC day service, they still want to be able to connect to the veterans that have served.”
Lynn has seen firsthand the difference that regional RSL Sub-Branches can make to veterans as the current President of the Warragul Sub-Branch.
“We have had a number of veterans come through Warragul RSL who are not members of the RSL but who are dealing with being disconnected from the broader community,” she said.
“We are currently assisting a veteran who is homeless and had not eaten for several days, so we are now ensuring he is getting regular meals. We are working with other community groups, like the Salvation Army and have gotten him into emergency accommodation while we look to find more permanent accommodation for him.”
Among the recommendations of the review that Lynn is assessing are changes to the make-up of committees at both the State and Sub-Branch level. The review found that many Sub-Branches struggle to find volunteers with skills and experience to meet the governance requirements.
The challenge Lynn sees for the RSL lies in how to best support the Sub-Branches whose volunteer committees are struggling under the weight of regulatory compliance.
“We have a limited and ageing volunteer base,” she said. “The organisation as a whole needs to think about how we structure ourselves so that we make it easier for those smaller branches to continue to operate and raise awareness of veterans in their communities without having the burdens placed upon them to meet those governance requirements,” Lynn Mizen said.
The review also recommended that steps to be taken to address a lack of diversity in the RSL, with most committee members now being male veterans in their 70’s.
“When I joined State Executive a year ago there were no women on State Executive,” Lynn said. “My key driver was to have that representation, there needed to be a female voice on the State Executive. And that is not just about recognising women veterans and their service but also all women who support their veteran peers or families in the work that they do through the RSL.”
For Lynn the greatest satisfaction in her time at the RSL has been seeing the value of social interaction for veterans in her community.
“For me when we hold a service, or at one of our monthly dinners, and you see all the members that have come along and you see how genuinely happy and engaged and active they are that you say, well this is what it is all about.”
