Moorabool Shire CouncilA great initiative by the Council, to engage residents on the kind of capital works infrastructure and program development that residents feel are needed in their community. It is from such small beginings that councils will become more confident in engagement and undertake broader programs in future years.
CE ‘fundamentals’ at Lorne & BenallaHeld in Lorne and Benalla, both these two day courses were run in September and co-delivered with Steven Sagona. These were the first and second of three DSE courses to be delivered for the Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV) as part of its ‘Small Towns Victoria’ project. Eighteen participants attended in Lorne, fifteen in Benalla. Both courses were attended by a variety of Municipalities and community members.
One of the regular scheduled courses at Daylesford, this course attracted thirteen participants from eight different State Government Departments, and three from Alcoa. This is the first we have attracted participants from the private sector. As usual, one of the consistent feedback items is the benefit gained from having to work with people from other work areas.
2 Day Training CourseStaff from the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission have to engage with the community as ‘community educators’ for part of their role. Working in collaboration with the Commission, we designed and developed a two day training course in community education. This included developing a new specialised ‘spectrum of engagement’ for community educators based on Arnstein’s ‘Ladder of Participation’. This spectrum and collaboration based training course would translate easily to many other areas of community education (such as health promotion).
Steven Sagona and I ran a short workshop with senior council staff, the Mayor and local residents to determine the future strategic direction to manage Nagambie Lake. The CEO was especially pleased that such a high level plan was able to be developed so quickly with considerable ‘buy in’ from a diverse group of stakeholders.