Club goes on the march against domestic violence
When David Harmon resolved to mobilize his community against domestic violence, he quickly ran into a first hurdle: persuading the mayor at the time to close the streets for a march. The small town of Ballina is a popular family vacation spot on Australia’s eastern coast, and the mayor worried the attention might be bad for business. “He said, ‘Dave, we will never, ever close a road in Ballina for a domestic violence walk. We’re a tourist town; we don’t want people to think that we’ve got all that happening in Ballina,’” Harmon recalls.
Then president of the Rotary Club of Ballina-on-Richmond and a retired teacher, Harmon got so many high school students to sign up — hundreds of them — that the mayor had no choice but to close the roads to ensure their safety. Altogether, 800 people turned out for the march in 2019, which marked the beginning of a campaign that would grow to include clubs in all 19 Rotary districts in Australia, New Zealand, and the southwest Pacific.
The experience was emblematic of both the resistance that Harmon would have to overcome and of the support he would harness to transform his community, shift culture, and revitalize his Rotary club.
For the Rotary Club of Ballina-on-Richmond, Australia, connecting with an important cause boosted its public image and revitalized its membership. From left: members Rob Chilman, Robyn Harmon, David Harmon, Colin Lee, and Jodie Shelley.
Image credit: Mark Lehn
One in 4 Australian women have experienced violence from an intimate partner. The prevalence is slightly lower than in Canada, Britain, or the United States, but frustrations have mounted about the pace of progress and an increase in the rate of deaths. According to one count by a journalist’s online project to memorialize women and children, at least 103 Australian women died as a result of violence last year, with more than half in instances of intimate-partner and family violence.
Large rallies around the country and other pressure from campaigners prompted the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, to acknowledge last year that domestic violence in Australia had become “a national crisis.”
It was a death in Melbourne in 2018 that moved Harmon to act. A friend’s sister was fatally stabbed in front of her three children and her house set on fire by her partner. As educators, Harmon and his wife, Robyn, were aware of family violence affecting school-age children, but that shocking death was a wake-up call. “I’m sitting there listening to the eulogy and I’m thinking what the bloody hell, this is crazy stuff,” he says.
Connect with a cause
The Rotary Club of Ballina-on-Richmond embraced a cause important to its community and saw its membership grow. For the club’s toolkit on transformation through action, visit rotaryclubofballinaonrichmond.org.au/rotary-zone-8. To engage in the No to Domestic and Family Violence campaign, consider this advice:
- Hold a community walk, public rally, or other event during the global 16 Days of Activism against gender-based violence from 25 November to 10 December.
- Work with local governments, schools, and service providers with expertise in domestic violence. Through partnerships, you can grow your impact, engagement, and public image.
- Support the work of organizations educating youth about respectful relationships.
As an incoming club president, Harmon wondered what he could do to make his community in Ballina a safer place for women and children. Robyn Harmon is also a club member, and the couple spent months knocking on doors throughout the region to ask agencies with involvement on the issue — from law enforcement and health to education and advocacy — what Rotary could contribute.
The 2019 march through Ballina was just the beginning. David Harmon worked with club members, including his wife and the club’s public image chair, Jodie Shelley, to form relationships with the New South Wales Police, schools, local governments, businesses, and service providers to promote awareness and prevention. The death of a Ballina woman in 2023 further galvanized the club’s emerging No to Domestic and Family Violence campaign.
Staff at a sports club and restaurant began wearing the campaign’s distinctive purple T-shirts on Fridays. Community members at other businesses, schools, and beyond soon followed. And every week since then, Ballina, a quaint town with sandy white beaches, has become a sea of purple in a visual stand known as Purple Fridays. Harmon calls the shirts “wearable advocacy” and says they’ve helped start important conversations.
Amid that visibility, the number of people coming forward to report cases has increased, says Richmond Police District Superintendent Scott Tanner. Some of those women were referred to him by Harmon after they approached the Rotarian at public events. “That tells us that women are feeling believed. They’re feeling heard, they’re feeling validated, and they have the confidence to report,” Harmon says.
Tanner has 32 years’ experience with the police and says Rotary has forced a change. “When I first joined the force, our community’s response to domestic violence was very poor,” he says. Now thanks to Rotary, says Tanner, “you can’t go down to Ballina on a Friday and not see a purple shirt.”
Harmon and club members wanted to go further and bring a change in culture that might prevent violence in the first place. They’ve joined up with the National Association for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect to support the organization’s school programming to educate teens about respectful relationships. The association’s strategic partnerships manager, Madelene McGrath, says she’s never seen a movement so successful at a grassroots level as this one. “Is it the size of the community?” she muses. “Is it the willingness of the community? Is it the amazing advocacy? It must be all of it.”
As 2023-24 governor of District 9640, Harmon helped spread the campaign around Australia and Rotary Zone 8, with his club serving as a resource hub on how to support women’s shelters, engage project partners, and more.
And he realized that connecting with a cause important to the community was an avenue to transform his club. Since 2019, membership has grown from about 30 to almost 90. Phillip Maguire, 65, is among the newcomers. He joined in 2023 after seeing the purple shirts. “The campaign made me ask questions to those wearing them and led me to Rotary to find out more,” he says. “Once introduced, I quickly realized it was a club that has a heart and was focused on real projects and issues.” Today, Maguire is the club’s president-nominee.
Harmon is still in touch with the former mayor who once resisted closing the roads. “We gave him a purple wristband in 2019,” Harmon says. “He’s never taken it off. He became our biggest advocate.”
This story originally appeared in the June 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.