The Committee Room Podcast

For every Committee that's trying to do good work - without losing the plot!

If your committee is spending more time arguing about the agenda than actually running your organisation, you’ve found the right podcast. Kate Hartwig and Kate McPhee are governance consultants who’ve seen it all — and they’re here to help.

A Practical Podcast

Real advice for real committees – no theory, no fluff

Built for Australian NFPs

Sporting clubs, community groups, associations of all kinds – we’ve got you.

New Episodes Weekly

Don’t miss out!  Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Latest Episodes

Ep 13 Running the Room

You can have the best-prepared agenda in the world and still have a terrible meeting if nobody’s running the room well. This episode covers the Chair’s real job — drawing out the quiet voices, redirecting the loud ones, and making sure every decision is properly made and properly recorded…

Read More

Ep 12 Before You Sit Down

All the good governance in the world only comes to life if your meetings work — and the work that makes a meeting run well happens days before anyone walks in the room. The first episode of the Smarter Meetings series covers everything that needs to happen before you sit down.

Read More
Bastille Day Special

Ep 11 Bastille Day Special

It’s Bastille Day, Kate M is live from Central France, and the Kates have found history’s best case study in governance failure. The French Revolution turns out to be surprisingly instructive. The governance content is completely serious. The framing is decidedly not. Madame La Guillotine is not an approved governance tool…

Read More

Ep 10 Your Questions Answered!

Biased minutes. A chair who’s ignoring a committee decision he disagrees with. A treasurer who resigned with no notice and took everything with them. These are real questions from real committee members — and in this first Your Questions Answered special, Kate H and Kate M work through eleven of them. Practical answers, no jargon, and the occasional Iced Vovo…

Read More

About the Kates...

Kate Hartwig

Kate has spent forty years working in and around not-for-profit and membership organisations — as a CEO, Director, and independent consultant. She’s seen governance done brilliantly and seen it done badly, across organisations from swimming pools to architects and AIDS charities and has spent the last decade helping Committees find their feet.

That breadth is what she brings to The Committee Room: practical, no-nonsense advice and a genuine belief that good governance is just common sense, applied consistently.

Kate McPhee

Kate McPhee has three decades of hands-on experience helping small clubs and associations get more done with less stress. Her background is gloriously eclectic — local government, state parliament, four children, forty-plus years of volunteering — and she’s project-managed the establishment, restructure, merger or dissolution of more than forty organisations.

She’s also the author of Just a Tick, a plain-English governance guide for committees and boards, and Principal Industry Consultant for Clubs SA’s Club Development Program.