Project Spotlight: 2017 IAP2 Australasia Organisation of the Year winner

Can you provide a general overview of your project?

For several years, Lake Macquarie City Council has worked to address local challenges by giving our community greater influence in decisions that affect them.

We believe some of the most important and difficult discussions and decisions affecting communities need to happen at a local level; How neighbourhoods will adapt to climate change, how our built environments can become more sustainable and inclusive, and how we can harness new technology and traverse the ‘digital pide’ are just some of the challenges that local councils and their communities face as they look to the future.

An expanded engagement program has provided opportunities for Council to innovate and work collaboratively with stakeholders, encouraging and supporting them to play a greater role in mapping out plans and options in response to current and future issues for their city.

Growth in the breadth and frequency of our engagement activities means we are now connecting with a larger proportion of our community than ever, while more collaborative approaches are yielding solutions to major challenges.

These efforts have resulted in a number of successful collaborations, which include our multi award-winning collaboration with residents to develop one of the first local area adaptation plans for sea level rise in Australia. Other examples include work to develop the city’s first digital economy strategy, Lake Mac Smart City, Smart Council, as well as the Securing our Future program, which delivered sustainable decision-making on the right level of rates and services for the city.

Tell us about your project:

a. What types of engagement methods/tools did you use?

Council has sought out new tools that not only make participation fun and interesting but, importantly, more open and interactive. Introduction of collaborative methods such as online interactive mapping, along with the establishment of several community working groups, has helped to bring participatory processes that are shared and deliberative into our everyday practice.

b. What principles did you find most useful in carrying out this project?

Building meaningful participation and sustainable decision making have been key guiding principles for our engagement program.

In seeking to build the capacity of the community to participate in a meaningful way, Council has shifted towards methods that encourage creative conversation and ideas generation, both online and face-to-face. This has often involved engagement of external thinkers and speakers who can provide additional insight into issues and opportunities.

For example, as part of Shape Your Future, a team of futurists were engaged to help residents imagine what their city could be like in the year 2050 as part of developing a new vision and values statement for the city. This ‘imagining’ was supported by visual aids such as augmented reality environments and videos.

We have also made concerted efforts to seek out and facilitate the involvement of people who are likely to be affected or interested in certain issues. This has given us new ways to reach out to more people in the community, especially hard to reach target groups, such as youth.

In developing the city’s first digital economy strategy, Smart City, Smart Council, the engagement team partnered to host Idea Bombing sessions to gather creative input from 18 to 25 year-olds about ways that new technology could be harnessed to make Lake Macquarie a better place to live, work and play. The engagement generated more than 100 ideas from participants.

c. Did you come across any surprises on this project?

Perhaps the biggest surprise is the ‘no-brainer’ that deeper participation increases community satisfaction.

We were pleased to achieve unprecedented levels of community engagement and collaboration, and doubly so when we also witnessed a corresponding increase in levels of community satisfaction and overall organisational performance of our Council. This included the strong results of our latest biennial customer satisfaction survey, conducted in 2016, which revealed that 93 per cent of respondents were at least somewhat satisfied with Council’s services and performance.

d. How were you able to reach such a large portion of the community?

Shape Your Future was successful in reaching 170,000 people and more than 4000 participated directly in engagement activities that generated 1800 ideas and priorities for the city. This is an unprecedented result for our Council for a three-month period of consultation. It suggests that our innovative approaches – from virtual reality, to footpath stickers, parklets, interactive mapping and involvement of futurists – worked to make it easy for people to understand and participate.

Council used virtual reality to help the community imagine what life in Lake Mac City could look like in 2050, as part of its Shape Your Future project.

Did you apply the IAP2 Spectrum or the IAP2 Core Values in this project?

In 2010, Council implemented a Community Engagement Strategic Guideline based on ten principles closely aligned to the IAP2 Core Values. This new ethos and framework has been strongly championed by our leadership, and has proved a catalyst for change in the culture and practice of participation, both within the organisation and in the local community. Since it was introduced, this values-led framework has been a catalyst for change in our culture and practice for participatory decision-making.

The Lake Macquarie City Community Engagement Strategic Guideline and set of Principles map closely with the IAP2 Core Values for Public Participation. Together they provide an ethos and framework for public participation that is reflected in engagement practice throughout the organisation.

Identifying stakeholders and selecting appropriate and relevant methods for engaging with them across the IAP2 participation spectrum is standard procedure for all projects. We assess the needs and interests of our stakeholders for each project and put in place strategies to seek out and facilitate their participation, whether the goal is to inform, consult, involve, collaborate or empower.

Key engagement staff are formally trained in IAP2 methodologies, and work within the Foundations of Public Participation, including the Code of Ethics. Council also keeps abreast of leading practice as an IAP2 member.

What did you find the most rewarding aspect of working on this project?

Seeing members of our community take on leadership roles in our collaborative projects has been highly rewarding, and has delivered excellent ideas and quality problem-solving for our city.

Working with perse ideas and opinions is often difficult but ultimately highly beneficial. One of the key strengths of our approach has been to realise the potential to achieve stronger outcomes by working with external partners who could bring expertise, knowledge and technical capabilities and introduce effective new engagement methodologies. Working partnerships with external providers, such as Twyfords (Power of Co), Consultation Manager and Social Pinpoint, that have significantly increased our capacity for broader and deeper public participation and helped us navigate our way through some difficult issues alongside our community.

What are the current challenges or barriers that still exist in this area of engagement?

Connecting with and engaging ‘hard to reach’ members of our community will always be a challenge and priority for our work. The more inclusive we make our approach to engagement, the more sustainable our decision making will become.

Were you able to overcome those barriers/challenges and if so how?

New technologies, such as online collaborative mapping and fun approaches such as ideas bombing are proving successful in getting young people involved in shaping their city. Balancing and integrating our online and face-to-face engagement is a key strategy for us in reaching out to as many people as possible in our community.

What are some of the learnt lessons from this project that others could learn from?

By building engagement strategies that are more open, inclusive and closely aligned to the Core Values, Council has been able to lead parties past initial positions of apprehension, even opposition, to find solutions to some major issues for the city’s future.

The principal example of this is our work to address the controversial and complex challenge of planning to adapt to sea level rise with residents of Marks Point and Belmont South. The process saw Council confront high levels of hostility and fear in the community and go on to collaborate with local residents over three years to produce a long-term strategy and 10-year Action Plan to help manage the effects of future sea level rise on their low-lying lakeside suburbs. The project has been recognised nationally and internationally and is included as a best practice case study in the Federal Government’s online coastal planning guide, CoastAdapt. Two key features of the engagement linked to this success are that:

• instead of prescribing the way in which Council would involve the community in developing the local adaption plans, the community was invited to co-design the engagement process; and
• a community working group and sub-committee was empowered to partner with Council, working alongside staff in engaging the broader community to understand flood risk and develop the local adaptation plan.

Council learnt a great deal through this trailblazing project, and took away insights and strategies that are proving useful beyond its local adaptation planning program.

To help create a Local Adaptation Plan, members of the community joined Council staff on a bus tour of low-lying areas across Lake Macquarie City to see flooding and drainage issues first-hand during a King Tide event.