Community engagement

Community Engagement: City of Canning (Australia)

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• published: 26 May 2015
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This video explains what engaging the community means at the city of Canning (Australia). Your Say Canning: http://yoursaycanning.com.au/. We want the City of Canning to be a fun, safe and liveable place. In order to make decisions about what that might be, we need to work together and listen to each other. When we do this well we call this effective community engagement. Let’s talk about just what that is... When a decision needs to be made about something that affects us, we often have different ideas about what that should be. We all have different wants and needs. One of our fundamental human needs is participation, which is to have a say in decisions that affect us. So what is community engagement anyway? Well, there are two really important parts to effective community engagement: speaking and listening. It is also not one person speaking and drowning out all other people’s voices. Great community engagement is a two way conversation. A dialogue with a variety of voices heard and expressed,. In effective community engagement you are not sure what the outcome might be when you go into it because the conversation will influence the outcome. It requires speaking, listening and understanding on all sides of the conversation. At the City of Canning, our vision is to become an engaging organisation that understands community values and priorities. We recognise the need to listen and work together to co-create sustainable solutions and a City that we are proud of. Public input into Council decision-making processes is key to good governance. It recognises the collective knowledge and capacity within the community to produce better outcomes. We want to hear from the community how we can improve or create a services, facilities and infrastructure. In setting the vision and direction for the City, we want to hear our community’s values and priorities now and into the future, as in the case of the Strategic Community Plan. We will also engage the community under Legislative requirements such as the Local Government Act, Planning and Development Act and Local Planning Scheme. To better engage our community, we have chosen five guiding principles that will keep us on the right track: • Inclusiveness and accessibility • Integrity • Communication and information • Evaluation and adaptability • Timeliness So now I'll tell you a little bit more about what we mean with each of these... 1. Inclusiveness and accessibility – we need to ensure people affected by, or who have an interest in a decision will have an opportunity to have a say. 2. Integrity – this means being open to diverse views and being honest about the level of engagement being used. For example, is the decision really open to being influenced through this conversation or are we really just providing information about a decision that has already been made? We also need to be open about how community input has influenced the final decision. 3. Communication and information – it is important to provide people with the information so they can fully participate and be clear about why and how they can be part of it. We need to make sure they are informed about the kind of constraints we have, for example financial costs or future predictions or situations such as climate change or fewer resources and growing demands upon the limited resources of our planet. 4. Evaluation and adaptability – we need to learn from our community engagement projects, from what really worked and what didn't. It's important that we document these and continually look for new ways to have a conversation with our community in a way that they want to participate. 5. Timeliness – we should allow enough time to plan and engage so that the conversation can actually have an impact on the decision when appropriate and engagement is done at the right time. For example not during school holidays, Christmas break or at a time when a decision has already been made. So these are principles that shall guide us in our community engagement. To find out more you can read our Community Engagement Strategy (which is what we want to achieve), our Policy (how we will achieve it), the Plan (a template to help prepare and do engagement) and our Guide (which is for when you need a little help). Visit Your Say Canning and begin the conversation http://yoursaycanning.com.au/.