City of Kwinana
Adapting To Constant Growth
Background
The City of Kwinana is proactively responding to massive changes in its community. It is the second fastest growing local government area in Western Australia and one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse municipalities, representing over 50 different countries. One in three people were born overseas and there is a significant indigenous population. Many new residents are migrants and refugees.
Community services support community cohesion and participation, especially in times of rapid change. The City Engagement Directorate is responsible for community services and commissioned Integral Development to undertake a review and make recommendations on the future structure and operations to optimise the beneficial impact of its services on the community.
The Directorate’s service areas contribute to community building through an emerging place management approach; greater activation of local areas and community centres; and maintaining high usage levels of recreation and cultural facilities.
The primary question considered throughout the review was—
What are the priorities for expenditure by Council to achieve a strong sense of community, community cohesion and to meet the overarching goal of being “Rich in Spirit” in the City of Kwinana?
Challenges
• Community services must keep pace with massive growth and demographic change
• Proactive engagement with the community and building social connection is critical to community cohesion.
• Perception of a gap between the effectiveness of existing structures and services and what was needed by the changing population.
Approach & Methodology
Engaging the key stakeholders for the City Engagement Directorate was fundamental to the review. They provided an understanding of change and its impact on the City which guided the interpretation of first hand information, staff workshops, data analysis of participation in services, cost of services and comparisons to local government benchmarks. The City’s Executive and Elected councillors engage with business and community members and provided their perception of the business and community concerns. Best practice elsewhere and opportunities for improvement were incorporated into the review.
The stages of the review were:
· Discovery phase canvassing the views of elected members, the executive team and City Engagement management in one on one interviews and staff workshop.
· Analysis and problem identification based on a desktop review of the Council’s information, previous reports and surveys, review of external literature on key topics, best practice literature and conversations with stakeholders.
· Validation of findings and options creation through further workshops with the project team, the executive team and with elected Councillors.
· Synthesis of all information and options and clearly aligning the agreed future options with the perceived problems and need for effective services that responded to the very different target groups within the community.
· Collation of draft, presentation for comment and finalisation of the report and recommendations
RESULTS
• Comprehensive review and recommendations adopted by City of Kwinana.
• City Engagement Directorate has realigned services to best meet the City of Kwinana strategic goal of Rich in Spirit and deliver highly valued services for community cohesion.
• Services are structured around place management and local engagement in one stream and customer focussed efficient facility based services in the second stream.
• Five service area reviews were subsequently completed by Integral Development to support capacity improvement in individual service areas to meet community priorities.
