Consultation on the draft Community Engagement Policy has now closed. Thank you to everyone for your contributions.

Council adopted the Community Engagement Policy at its 17 February 2021 Ordinary Council Meeting. Visit the Council Meetings page on Council's website at https://www.portphillip.vic.gov.au/about-the-council/council-meetings to view the Council Report, Engagement summary report and final Community Engagement Policy. These documents are also available in the document library on this page.

The Policy outlines Council’s approach to community engagement and commitment to facilitating genuine and transparent opportunities for the community to provide feedback and inform the decisions made by Council, and to drawing on the community's expertise to co-design solutions and build shared ownership and responsibility for outcomes.

Your feedback helped refine Council promise to our community and outcomes we want to achieve through this policy.

What is community engagement?

We're lucky to have an engaged and passionate community with a deep well of knowledge and lived experience. Your contribution allows Council to have a greater understanding of diverse points of view, values, concerns and priorities when making decisions and enhances Council’s capacity to make well-informed, acceptable and sustainable decisions on behalf of the community it represents.

Community engagement involves having conversations and working with people in our community who are interested in or may be affected by Council’s decision-making. It also provides opportunities for our community and Council to learn together and build shared knowledge through experiences, actions and learnings.

Our Community Engagement Policy demonstrates the City of Port Phillip’s commitment to facilitating genuine and transparent opportunities for the community to provide feedback and inform the decisions made by Council, and to drawing on the community's expertise to co-design solutions and build shared ownership and responsibility for outcomes.

Background

Through our first consultation on this policy in February and March 2020, we discovered that the way Council engages with you is important. This engagement must be meaningful, robust and effective; it should provide genuine opportunities to engage with local decision making and impact how Council responds to community issues and concerns.

We also learnt that engagement with Council adds to a feeling of community belonging and connectedness. How we engage should be inclusive, representative and a critical ingredient in staying informed and sharing a vision. We've listened to this feedback, and incorporated this into our draft policy, which we asked for your feedback in December 2020.

Your feedback was shared with Councillors in January 2021, to inform any changes to the draft policy prior to a final policy being presented for adoption at the 17 February 2021 Ordinary Meeting of Council.