About us

Your Say Yarra is Yarra Council's community engagement tool that lets you provide feedback on plans and decisions that impact your community.

Here you can contribute ideas, provide feedback and exchange views with others on projects and initiatives in your neighbourhood.

Community engagement at Yarra

At Yarra, we’re committed to genuinely involving you in the decisions we make. We do this through community engagement.

Community engagement invites our community to be part of our planning and decision-making. By understanding your needs, aspirations, concerns and ideas we can greatly improve our planning and delivery of services.

Good community engagement also creates respectful relationships, strengthens communities and builds trust.

Our Community Engagement Policy

Yarra’s Community Engagement Policy sets out our principles and values and commitment to community engagement. This policy also outlines the role that you as a community member can reasonably expect to play in Council decision-making.

Our promise to you

We commit to community engagement that is:

We identify people and groups likely to be affected by our decision, and ensure they have the chance to participate.

We use methods that empower underrepresented groups to get involved. We use a variety of online, print and face-to-face methods to maximise our reach and remove potential barriers and ensure culturally safe spaces for engagement.

We empower stakeholders with relevant, objective and plain English information and resources to allow informed participation.

We explain which elements the community can influence, to what level and how we will use our community’s input.

We report back to the community, explaining what we asked, what we heard, and what we did.

We value and respect our community’s time, engaging closely when their influence is high and scaling back when it is more limited.

We adapt to evolving circumstances, including allowing for newly identified stakeholders to engage as necessary throughout the process.

We advocate on behalf of the Yarra community where the work of external agencies (including other tiers of government) impacts our community.

We ensure our engagement practitioners and decision makers have the appropriate training, guidance and resources.

These principles are based on best-practice engagement frameworks, including the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) Core Values for the Practice of Public Participation, the Victorian Auditor General’s Office (VAGO) Public Participation Principles and the principles outlined in the Victorian Local Government Act 2020.

IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation

Different types of engagement suit different decisions according to the level of impact, and level of influence the community will have.

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