Community Conversations by Woodlea is a resident voice project seeking to provide a platform for community members to share concerns, experiences, and opportunities with the Developer. These conversations are started at face-to-face or digitally, either by community members themselves or in response to questions and prompts given to them.

Often, Woodlea was able to provide a public response to community members which helped to clarify, educate, or explain some detail of the development, or point towards future amenity within the project. Reports are generated for the developer to utilise the data coming from residents to improve or enhance the project in the future.

On other occasions, questions or challenges posed by community were outside of the developer’s project scope and pertained to issues with public transport (PTV), law enforcement (Victoria Police), State Government roads (VICRoads), or local council (Melton Council). Through contacts and networks I developed with these organisations and authorities, these reports were provided in order to inform and obtain information to pass back onto residents in the form of an offical response. Sometimes, the reports enables these organisations to have valuable data and insights to inform future plans, or they provided the developer with opportunity for advocacy on behalf of local residents, much of which was driven by myself. By advocating with our data and stories to council, government and others for things such as connecting road upgrades, safety measures, and public transport, Woodlea is able to deliver a strong experience for their community post sale.

Features of this project included:

• Online group for conversations about challenges and opportunities residents were facing

• Surveys, polls, questions and other data collection points

• Face to face seminars, workshops and events to engage the community in a space where they can share their opinions and ask questions

• Detailed reports providing community feedback to Woodlea’s development team

• Network of relationships with Council, State Government and other agencies to provide them with feedback and the community with answers to their questions

• Conduit of information between Woodlea, council, State Government and other authorities to educate and inform the community of processes, timelines, and projects

• Delivering advocacy to State Government, Council and other authorities,

• Mobilising the community for advocacy