Community Engagement covers a wide variety of Council/community connections, ranging from information sharing and community consultation, to active participation in policy development and decision-making processes.

Community Engagement is a genuine process of working with people to build capacity, strengthen relationships and inform decisions.

Our community engagement commitment is to:

We use feedback gathered through engagement activities in service planning, decision-making and advocacy. Evidence based decision-making results in improved service delivery because it is informed by knowledge of community needs and expectations.

Council’s Community Engagement practices are guided by our Community Engagement Policy and Procedures Package (CEP&PP). The CEP&PP builds upon our current organisational community engagement practices and was designed to provide guidelines and advice to council officers to navigate community engagement processes. The application of processes within the CEP&PP seeks to ensure we are consistently planning, implementing and evaluating meaningful, transparent and accountable community engagement initiatives.

There are four key components to the CEP&PP:

1. Community Engagement Policy – developing how we plan for community engagement
2. Toolkit, templates and resources – tools and techniques to do community engagement
3. Digital Knowledge Bank – all of Council's consultation reports in one central location
4. Community Engagement Training Program – to build internal capacity to both plan and do community engagement

To explore and contribute to some projects undertaking Community Engagement, visit the Shaping Banyule homepage