The National Village Leadership Forum is a different kind of room. Where the Summit gathers the executives, this one is built for the people running villages day to day, and you can hear the difference in the questions. eevi was proud to sponsor the Property Council of Australia and Retirement Living Council's full day program, and to spend it with the managers actually holding these problems.
Chaired by Daniel Gannon (Executive Director, Retirement Living Council), the program was refreshingly practical from the first session.
Angus Abadee, the NSW Strata and Property Services Commissioner, opened with a keynote on fair trading, trust and the future of village management. His point was a good one to start a day like this: resident confidence is built or lost in everyday interactions inside a village, not in a policy document. Sarah Hood (Press Pause Coaching) followed on psychological safety, unpacking what it actually takes to build a team where someone can raise a concern or admit a mistake without fear. For managers who spend their days mediating between residents, families and head office, it landed.
When care gets more complex
eevi sponsored session three, "When care gets more complex: boundaries, referrals and resident support", a panel that included Daniel Jameson (Design Lead, The Dementia Centre) and Liz Johns of Keyton. It went straight to the hardest question in the sector right now.
Village managers are not clinicians. Yet residents are ageing in place with increasingly complex needs, and the line between what a village can reasonably support and what needs a referral is getting blurrier every year. Managers are being asked to make that call, often without the information to make it confidently, and to carry the worry when they get it wrong.
Daniel's work on how built and social environments help people living with dementia to thrive is territory we know well. Design and technology are solving the same problem from opposite ends: how do you keep a familiar environment working for someone whose needs are changing, rather than moving them somewhere else. That is the thinking behind our own dementia monitoring, and it was good to hear it put to a room of village managers.
That is the gap we built eeviCare for. Giving teams visibility of what is happening in a resident's home, and the ability to triage the right response to the right call, is what lets a manager act early and refer with confidence rather than react late.
The stars of the show
Without question, the standout came after lunch. Roger Pallant (President, Retirement Village Residents Association) and Dr Diane Hart (Vice President, RVRA) took the stage for "Setting the tone: building respectful partnerships with resident committees".
It was colourful, it was very funny, and it was genuinely useful. Two resident leaders telling a room full of operators exactly how the relationship looks from the other side of the table. Their advice was disarmingly simple: respect the different roles, build trust before you need it, communicate early. The room was completely with them.
The afternoon carried on with a panel on the link between resident experience and community harmony, a session from Caleb Bateman (Infotrust) on the practical opportunities, risks and guardrails around AI in the village office, and a closing panel from Decode on emergency management and leading through crisis.
What we took away
The clearest signal of the day was the Property Council's commitment towards care. Care is being treated as core business for retirement living, not an optional extra bolted on at the end. Coming eight weeks after the Summit, where embedding care went from the edges of the conversation to the conversation itself, it confirms a genuine shift rather than a moment.
Our thanks to Daniel Gannon for the generous shoutout on stage recognising eevi being named Innovation of the Year for Dementia Monitoring at the 2026 Ageing Asia World Ageing Festival. To be acknowledged in front of the people doing this work every day means a great deal.
eeviCare is modular, cloud-based and purpose-built for the continuum of care, not adapted from a hospital system. It is Australian-owned, trusted today by more than 100 communities and monitoring over 10,000 lives across Australia.
If you are embedding care into an existing village, you should talk to eevi. Visit eevi.life or call 1300 802 738.