Community Engagement

About Community Engagement

Community engagement empowers our community to actively participate in and shape Council’s decision-making processes. Council is dedicated to listen, learn, and collaborate with residents and stakeholders.

We value local knowledge, ideas, and feedback as crucial to achieving better and more sustainable outcomes for our community.

Community Pop-ups

Meeting community where they are, our community pop-ups place Council staff at high-traffic locations across the Municipality during peak times. These pop-ups provide informal opportunities to engage directly with us throughout the year and complementing our online engagement efforts and targeted stakeholder activities.

See our Community Pop-Ups schedule

Our Community Engagement Strategy

Developed collaboratively with community members and Council staff, the strategy provides a structured framework for engaging residents on crucial issues, projects, and policies. It focuses on transparency and inclusivity, aiming to build staff capacity, meet communities where they are, and close the loop through timely follow-up communications.

By prioritising these key action areas, Council aims to strengthen how it engages with the community, cultivates trust and ensures decisions reflect the diversity of voices of our community.

We will:

Clearly communicate and promote engagement opportunities through various mediums, including local newspapers, regular Council e-newsletters, Council website, Council social media, rates notice, etc.
Offer a range of face-to-face, online and paper-based engagement opportunities for people to engage with Council decisions in various ways.
Develop an engagement calendar to meet community where they are and streamline engagement activities across the organisation (see Appendix 1 for the proposed Community Engagement Schedule).
Explore digital engagement platforms to enhance accessibility and broaden community reach, including online polls that provide feedback by design.
Build on existing community networks and identify community champions to drive engagement with communities of place, identity, interest and need.
Collaborate with youth and other underrepresented groups to co-design and implement engagement activities that are relevant and accessible to them.

We will:

Clearly communicate and promote engagement opportunities through various mediums, including local newspapers, regular Council e-newsletters, Council website, Council social media, rates notice, etc.
Offer a range of face-to-face, online and paper-based engagement opportunities for people to engage with Council decisions in various ways.
Develop an engagement calendar to meet community where they are and streamline engagement activities across the organisation (see Appendix 1 for the proposed Community Engagement Schedule).
Explore digital engagement platforms to enhance accessibility and broaden community reach, including online polls that provide feedback by design.
Build on existing community networks and identify community champions to drive engagement with communities of place, identity, interest and need.
Collaborate with youth and other underrepresented groups to co-design and implement engagement activities that are relevant and accessible to them.

We will:

Develop processes to close the loop in a variety of ways, including Council reporting, website, email, social media and other mediums, with a focus on explaining how and when community feedback was considered in the decision-making process.
Continually develop and improve Council’s community engagement practices and capacity through regular review and evaluation.
Assess engagement activities effectiveness against the Strategy’s principles and the diversity, equity and inclusion objectives.
Assess engagement activities effectiveness against the Community Engagement Strategy’s objective and principles including diversity, equity and inclusion, and in contributing towards the Community Strategic Plan’s outcomes and strategies.
Monitor community sentiment via a range of mediums including social media monitoring, a demographic “community satisfaction” survey of Kiama Municipality, feedback from workshops, community events, committees and community groups.