This consultation is closed.

In 2019, we asked how you want to be involved in decision making in Yarra. We asked what decisions are most important to you, how you would like to be involved and what might encourage or prevent you from having your say.

We learnt so much from nearly 400 community contributions and your input helped us create our Community Engagement Policy and Community Engagement Action Plan 2020-2024. These were adopted at a Council Meeting on Tuesday 15 September 2020.

Read our Community Engagement Policy

Who did we talk to?

We talked to people across Yarra to make sure we heard from diverse groups in our community. As well as promoting the online survey we:

  • went out to community events
  • invited all our community advisory groups to participate
  • reached out to culturally and linguistically diverse communities through our neighbourhood houses
  • involved children and young people in a range of projects
  • used different methods to make sure we heard from our growing renter population.

What you told us

Some key things we learnt from your feedback were:

You want to be able to quickly identify how a decision might impact you, your family or your neighborhood.

Understanding the decision, the influence you have and that your input will be heard is more important to you than engaging in something that is quick but less meaningful.

Being empowered with information and receiving it through the right channels is really important to encourage some groups to participate, particularly young people (12-24 year olds) and our culturally and linguistically diverse communities.

Different groups in our community prioritise the decisions they want to be involved in differently but on some things there is broad agreement.

Just a few examples include:

  • Renters in multi-unit developments rate planning for open space a number one priority, while for apartment owners urban planning is more important.
  • For renters generally, libraries are the stand out priority and for people living in public housing it is services supporting community well-being.
  • We heard that all age groups rate planning for environment and sustainability outcomes a very high priority.