city of casey community engagement strategy

OVERVIEW

Organisation: 
City of Casey

Strategy:     
Community Engagement

Issues:
Community Engagement in Victoria’s most populous and culturally diverse local government

Key points:

Aim:       
To assist Victoria’s most populous and significant growth Council to identify internal interest and capacity to engage Casey’s many Council. To respond to this assessment by firstly producing a series of internal documents geared to increasing the profile, need and organisational commitment to community engagement. Secondly, to produce a public Community Engagement Strategy.

Process:                 
We began this work by engaging with staff through interviewing the Executive and all Managers in the organisation and convening a series of workshops with staff from across the organisation who would be expected to embody and deliver upon the Strategy once developed.

The output of these engagements was a Strategic Context Report. This report identified areas of strength in community engagement, receptiveness to change, where capacity needed to be built and training for the organisation. ‘New Ways’ was a process instituted at the City of Casey to introduce a series of organisational wide changes to the ways entire Council approached and conducted its business. Community engagement and our strategy work was one the New Ways initiatives.

We developed an organisational change framework that was workshopped with staff from across the organisation to test its ability to be implemented. From here we set about developing a number of internal documents, a series of recommendations and the Community Engagement Strategy.

Outcome:

This broad reaching Policy and Strategy work was well managed and benefited from successful engagement with the Executive, Steering Group and staff engagement champions. In 2016 Council approved the Community Engagement Strategy. In a we produced a number of internal documents including:

  • Community Engagement Manual

  • Community Engagement Plan Template

  • Community Engagement Policy

  • Strategic Context Report

  • Organisational change framework

  • Training Plan

  • Recommendations

We wish the City of Casey staff and Casey’s many communities the very best in their future engagements.