A couple of weeks ago we had the pleasure of being invited to the Engagement by the Beach conference in Manly, NSW. Darius and the team from Captivate consulting put this event on every year to both celebrate community engagement practitioners and those working in the space but also to facilitate a platform for knowledge sharing. There were folks from many corners of Australia and as we have learned pretty quickly working in this engagement space, there was no shortage of discussion!

I won’t recap the entire event from end-to-end but would like to highlight a couple of my personal fav moments and learnings to share with you too.

The day officially started with a presentation by Sue Heins, the Mayor of Northern Beaches Council. I hadn’t met Sue before, so I had no expectations of where she might go topic wise…thanks for attending I suppose was my base expectation. Her presentation to our group of 80+ engagement folk hit pretty hard though - in fact she highlighted quite a few key points that got my head nodding:

• Trust….so important in this line of work.
• Timing is super important, and getting feedback right - there is an expectation these days that decision making should be happening fast, and people want results quickly, from both a community perspective and practitioner/council perspective.
• The cleaner the data, the easier the decision is to make…but sometimes it gets messy, especially if we’re talking about dog parks or dogs on beaches!
• Data can be skewed when dealing with highly emotive issues.
• Data and verbatim commentary is very important to consider.

I could list heaps more, but she kept hitting all different angles on DATA! There is so much data floating through and around our local councils and communities more broadly, and the importance of how we capture, work with, use and follow up on that data has become more clear than ever.

Amanda Newbury from Articulous presented later on in the day and had some really interesting research to share about what communities love and hate about community engagement. I think it has been more clear to us what people like about it, but the reasons people sometimes shy away from engagement opportunities was really interesting and got me thinking about new approaches. Some of the reasons people might not want to engage were related to self-confidence - people being shy or felling anxious, futility - thinking their opinion wont take them anywhere or get anything done, fear of aggression - being afraid that other might be upset with hearing from them, and lastly sometimes it’s important to think about how cultural background might have an impact on the typical formats of our engagement practice. How do we ask our community what works best for them and how can we implement this in a meaningful way?

If anyone has heard my skatepark stories, you’ll know why this next presenter struck a chord. Lian Loke spoke to our group about playable cities and had some really cool projects on the go, including a couple of skatepark executions. I think my personal fav was the idea of creating skatable sculptures. There are so many places around the world where this has happened un-intentionally, I guess skaters look at any object for it skatability. But why not create sculpture that is both beautiful to look at and functional from a recreational perspective too? Often we’re talking about blocks and walls of concrete - might as well get creative with it in our urban environments. Lian has a few co-design workshops in cities around the country coming up, if you’re into skateparks and art please look her up!

A special mega-thanks goes out to Darius and his team at Captivate Consulting. They put on a great event and I highly recommend attending next year if you can make it! To be honest, the vibe made the entire day, so many passionate and fun participants sharing ideas and experiences. If you’re interested in hearing more reach out to Darius or feel free to hit us up as well!