Yarra Ranges Council met with community members on 27 February for our ‘Safer, Stronger, Together’ combined community panel workshop. The purpose of this engagement was to understand the needs of our community and to see how the community could assist Yarra Ranges Council and Councillors in preparing its Council Plan, Community Vision, Financial Plan and Budget.

Leading up to the workshop, Yarra Ranges Council had reached out to the community through multiple channels, such as newsletters, social media platforms and community groups, encouraging them to be part of our deliberative engagement session and to have their say in developing the Council Plan 2021-2025.

Through this promotion, 60 community members were selected for the Council Plan development community panel through our external consulting team.

The community panel covered a wide range of demographics, gender and community groups across the Yarra Ranges community, as well as ensuring that each region (Hills, Urban and Valley) were evenly represented.

The participants were given information to learn more about Council to help them understand and prepare for online sessions held on 20 and 22 February. These sessions focused on regional priorities for the community members, discussion of services, what was important to them and their overall satisfaction with Council’s efforts. Outcomes from this session went on to design our final engagement workshop.

Council would like to thank all community panel members for their time and input into the final engagement workshop at Box Hill Institute, which informed the final priorities and recommendations that were presented to Councillors at the end of the day.

These recommendations, including all supporting comments made by the community, will be used by Council and Councillors to help develop the new Council Plan 2021-2025.

Councillors then held their own workshop on 27 March to set the strategic goals and priorities for the next four years.

Council encourages the community to continue to stay engaged with the development of the new Council Plan, as future opportunities will become available to participate in similar community engagement sessions and workshops. Our most recent exercise that we’d love to get your involved is about shaping our budgeting decision and priorities exercise.

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