Podcast Episode: Lessons in Community Service and Personal Growth

Pip: Brett Hayhoe has lived what most people would call several full careers — and apparently still had evenings free to join more boards.

Mara: This episode follows one thread from Ask Brett: what happens when you give your time, your health, and your social life to community, and what you carry away from it.

Pip: Let's get into it — starting with the lessons community service actually teaches you.

Lessons in Community Service and Personal Growth

Pip: The question this post is really sitting with is what it costs to be useful — and whether the cost is ever acknowledged, by anyone, including yourself.

Mara: The post frames that cost plainly. After years of boards, committees, and advocacy roles, it lands here: "if you're doing this kind of thing for thanks or praise, you will be bitterly disappointed — so 'no expectations, no disappointments' became something close to a personal mantra."

Pip: That is not a mantra you arrive at on a good day. That is a mantra you chisel out after a long stretch of invisible labor.

Mara: The post traces exactly how that stretch accumulated. Moving to Melbourne after coming out, landing a role at JOY FM, and almost immediately fielding invitations to join boards — PLWHA Victoria, the VGLRL, Pride March Victoria, the Attorney-General's Advisory Committee on LGBTIQA+ community issues, NAPWA, GALTA. The list is not short.

Pip: At one point people were apparently asking, with a straight face, whether there was a board he didn't sit on.

Mara: And the answer involved only slight exaggeration. What the post is careful to say is that none of this felt like a burden at the time — the framing is direct: "if you identify as a member of a community, and you're capable and willing, you do whatever you can to support it."

Pip: Which is a generous philosophy right up until it quietly costs you your social ties.

Mara: That is precisely what the post names. Twelve years on the InterPride board — meaningful work, no regrets — but it created a slow disconnect from Melbourne. The observation is unsentimental: people who stop seeing you regularly at functions simply forget you. Not maliciously, the post says. Just efficiently.

Pip: Efficiently is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

Mara: After InterPride, the pattern repeated — political organisation, local council advisory committee, senior executive roles across several branches, back onto the VGLRL board. Then a serious illness in 2023 changed the shape of everything. Capacity narrowed. Community engagement narrowed with it, down to one local branch — which, the post notes, still turned out to be necessary.

Pip: Some form of human contact, it seems, is non-negotiable even for a confirmed hermit.

Mara: That is almost verbatim what the post says. And the conclusion it reaches is that the work mattered, the reasons were right, and that has to be enough — because it always was.

Pip: What stays with me is that "no expectations, no disappointments" sounds like resignation but reads, in context, like hard-won clarity.

Mara: It is the difference between giving up on recognition and never needing it in the first place. More from Ask Brett next time.