Glen Eira 2040 Community Vision

Draft Glen Eira 2040 Community Vision

Your community representatives have worked hard to develop the draft Vision for Glen Eira:

Our Glen Eira: A thriving community of empowered citizens working together for an inclusive and sustainable future.

The draft vision statement is accompanied by six principles and two minority reports. The six principles will drive the delivery of the Community Vision.

The process for developing the Community Vision was vigorous. The vision statement and principles had to be accepted by a ‘super majority’ of panel members (80% or more) to be included in the report. Minority reports were provided for elements that did not receive majority support but were still regarded as important to consider by some panel members.

The public exhibition has closed. 

Following public exhibition of the draft Community Vision, the community panel is set to meet again for one final meeting in March 2021. This session will allow the panel to review and respond to the community’s comments and feedback and to edit and finalise the Community Vision. 

The final Glen Eira 2040 Community Vision will come into effect once endorsed by Council in mid-2021. It will guide and influence all of Glen Eira City Council’s planning and strategies for the municipality over the next 20 years.

Why a vision for Glen Eira?

Have you ever stopped to think what Glen Eira will look like in the future? 

Thinking back it wasn’t all that many years ago, that the City of Glen Eira was formed (1994).  Around that time, there were approximately 51,000 households and we had a population of around 112,000 (Census, 1996).  The World Wide Web was beginning to take off and phones were mobile, however they were just phones with buttons — not touch screens.

Fast forward to today, and we have almost 60,000 households and a population of around 154,000 (ABS, 2018) that is rich with a diversity of culture, interests and needs — who can imagine what the next 10, 20 or 30 years might bring.

We believe it is time to imagine; to actively look to the future and imagine what we want Glen Eira to look and feel like. We seek to develop a vision with the community for the community to provide a clear direction for strategically creating a future Glen Eira.

Using a comprehensive engagement process, we want to understand the aspirations and priorities that create and achieve our Community Vision. This will be based on evidence of current and future community needs and will be used to guide our strategic actions into the future.

What’s happened so far…

The Community Vision commenced with a co-design process. With 25 community leaders coming together over two sessions to determine the scope of engagement, key themes, strategies to increase participation and engagement activities. This process was used to create the remit, or guiding question, for the development of the Community Vision. This remit is:

“What is our vision for the future of Glen Eira and how can we reflect the aspirations of our diverse and growing community”

The co-design process also formed the basis of the engagement plan which included broad engagement activities and the use of a deliberative citizens’ panel, representative of Glen Eira, to write the Community Vision.

Using this plan, a series of broad engagement activities commenced in September 2019, including:

• launch of the Community Vision
• a survey with our Community Voice members
• eight pop-up engagement activities at various community events and places across Glen Eira
• online engagement on ‘Have Your Say’
• a hard copy feedback form sent to every household
• a youth survey
• hundreds of sheets for children to draw their future vision.

More than 3,000 people told us about their aspirations for the future of Glen Eira via these activities.

Key action areas

These action areas include (in no particular order):

1. Green, sustainable and environmentally conscious
2. Well designed, with a mix of quality housing and local neighbourhood character
3. A place for active, leisure and sporting activities
4. Connected and easy to move around using any mode of transport
5. Diverse, inclusive and healthy
6. Thriving, with vibrant shopping strips and businesses
7. Safe, clean and tidy
8. A place to connect, create and learn
9. Supportive of residents in need
10. Informed and involved
11. Effectively and efficiently supported by Council’s organisation
12. Home to arts and culture that celebrate our identity and heritage

These action areas were refined through the second stage of community engagement. This stage sought to gain an understanding of how our community feels about these areas. This includes gaining specific information, and to see if anything was missing. This stage of engagement included:

• a series of four pop ups
• five community workshops
• several kitchen table conversations, and;
• an online / hard copy survey.

This stage of engagement presents participants with descriptions of the 12 action areas. We also ask the following questions:

1. Please tell us your top three to five most important action areas for the Glen Eira community (in no order), and why?
2. Are there any action areas missing from the list?
3. What advice would you give if you had two minutes with the panel members of the Glen Eira 2040 Community Vision?

This stage of engagement receives feedback from over 850 people. The depth of information collected was provided to the Deliberative Citizens' Panel to assist in their understanding of the Community Aspirations the Community Vision.

The Deliberative Citizens’ Panel

A Deliberative Citizens’ Panel was selected to write the Community Vision in March 2020. This process was paused for five months due to the impacts of COVID-19 but resumed online in August 2020. 

In early March, 42 community members were randomly selected to create a group broadly representative of Glen Eira. The registration of more than 300 people allows an independent consultant to choose a sample of people with a balance of ages, gender, location, social backgrounds and different cultures to reflect the diversity within our municipality.

The job of the panel was to review background information, hear from field experts and deliberate with each other to develop a Community Vision for Glen Eira that responds to the remit:

“What is our vision for the future of Glen Eira and how can we reflect the aspirations of our diverse and growing community”

The panel was facilitated by MosaicLab — an independent organisation with expertise in facilitating deliberative processes.

Our panel commenced their work in March with 37 members being able to meet in person. This allowed our panel to get to know each other, identify their working styles, hear presentations from experts and receive all relevant background information.

Following these two meetings, the entire panel process was placed on hold due to the impacts of COVID-19. After five months the decision was made to resume the work to develop the Glen Eira 2040 Community Vision online.

Of the existing Panel members, 32 agreed to continue on the panel to develop the Community Vision via an online process. This group were able to meet over four sessions via Zoom in August 2020 to develop a draft Glen Eira 2040 Community Vision.

This draft Glen Eira 2040 Community Vision has been written and agreed to by the Deliberative Citizens’ Panel with a super majority vote (over 80% agreement).

Frequently asked questions