There may be times when you become aware of a brewing crisis before it becomes public or you could be contacted by media for comment about it. Either way, you need to be prepared for how to handle the situation. It’s important to not ignore it, but rather address it and be as open and honest about the situation.

In a municipality that is home to over 100,000 human residents and 8000 four-legged residents (sharing only 353 hectares of open space), conversations about the management of shared spaces is not a new one for the City of Port Phillip. 

Sometimes, engaging with communities can be a difficult and complex process. Sometimes, we don’t get the results we planned for. Sometimes, the community can tell us things that are ‘out of scope’ or ‘not relevant’ to project outcomes. Sometimes, projects that seem relatively straightforward can trigger conversations about deeper, more complex or nuanced issues in communities. Sometimes, these results can seem like a whole lot of extra work or an engagement program that doesn’t ‘create value’.

We’d love this resource to be shared by project teams to aid participation in their consultation and engagement processes, and by community groups wanting to make changes in their local communities.

Late last year, Conversation Co had the privilege to work with the Graduate Student Association at the University of Melbourne. The purpose of our project was to understand the strengths of graduate students and researchers and the challenges they face while completing PhDs and Masters by Research to advocate for improved supervision, processes and University support. 

Pop-up events take a project to the places and spaces your community already use. This is an opportunity to reach a broad sample of people, but only if they feel safe and welcome to participate.

Yarra Park is one of Melbourne’s premier public parklands, it also provides the setting for the major sporting facilities of the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) and the Richmond Cricket Ground/Punt Road Oval. Together, the parkland and surrounding facilities provide important social, economic and environmental benefits to Victorians. Yarra Park also has a significant indigenous cultural heritage and is noted for its landscape and sporting heritage. 

January 26th; Australia Day/Invasion Day/Survival Day has been a long-battled date for the national celebration of our country. January 26th marks the date when Captain Arthur Phillip raised the British flag at Sydney Cove, an indication that Britain was taking formal possession of New South Wales. For Indigenous people, this day marks the beginning of ongoing colonial violence, discrimination and trauma. It’s a day for mourning and commemorating survival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.  As such, it’s a date that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities around Australia do not feel inclined to celebrate or included in the occasion. 

As a journalist for 20 years, I have seen many different styles and techniques used in public speaking. From people who are very confident, to those who use humour to keep the audience engaged and others where I have been left wondering, what was their key message?

How does your organisation measure its value? Its impact on the wider community? In community engagement land, we commonly use numbers to measure our success. That is the easy part. The more challenging question is – what impact are we making in the world? Are we making a real difference? 

Today (and everyday) is a day to #choosewomen owned businesses. In Australia, 38% of small businesses are owned by women and in New Zealand, this is 27% compared to 42% in the United States (which normally (still have) have a lot to answer for). 

Folk from a kindergarten service in the City of Hume engaged me to support children’s resilience and wellbeing earlier this year. In Term 3, children were becoming less and less interested in fruit, and more and more interested in chocolate. We were faced with a dilemma: honouring families’ knowledge of what their children would eat, and our knowledge of the importance of offering children a healthy, balanced diet.

Ethical Interactions is a Melbourne-based early childhood consultancy which uses co-design methodologies to design professional learning programs for professionals and advocate for children and their families. 

Greater Dandenong City Council is planning for a community hub in central Dandenong. Community hubs are multi-purpose community facilities providing a range of complementary services in a single accessible location and generally have a range of shared facilities and functions for the community, groups and organisations.

Conversation Co is working with the University of Melbourne Graduate Student Association seeking feedback from students about their experience with research supervision. At the University of Melbourne, there are 5400 graduate researchers being supervised by 2700 academics. 

Conversation Co is heading out to Wellington Shire next weekend to engage with community members about what they think ageing well in place looks like. Wellington Shire is undertaking research to understand their older residents’ experiences of place, programs and services to see where they can offer support to promote healthy living well into the 100s! The project seeks to gain feedback on community strengths and areas for improvement when it comes to providing care planning, access to services, programs for older people, community life and connectivity in rural communities. 

World Kindness is on the 13th of November. It’s an international movement to celebrate the joy of being kind to one another, by doing things big or small to help each other out, make each other laugh, teach each other something or support each other when things aren’t going great.

We’ve found the community is always proud of the fact that they recycle – glass, plastics and soft plastics. Likewise, if something has been in the media (China Sword Policy), the community often gets disheartened about their efforts and the value of recycling. We’ve been pretty chuffed to work on projects to better support and prepare the community to give household items a second/third/fourth life!

As we enter the last quarter of 2022, we’ve noticed that sometimes project teams steer clear from engaging over the summer holidays and often not starting again till February.

What is your bin ritual? Is it waking up at 5am when you hear the bin truck driving past? Do you have a housemate or a partner that overfills the bin? Did you dress up in lockdown to take the bins out? Do you remind your neighbours that tonight is ‘bin night’?