In March of this year, myself and my colleagues facilitated a community comments session for a project focused on reinforcing the supply and security of power within the Melville and Fremantle regions.

The session focused only on listening to and capturing community thoughts, questions and ideas.   It was an opportunity for the community to vent, without interuption, on the project at large.

The output from the session was then put into a report and fed back to Western Power's technical experts and decision makers for consideration, and more importantly, for response.

Our experts and decision makers then busily set about responding to the community questions captured in the above session.   After an initial go at responding, my team and myself put ourselves in your shoes and went through the responses and called out; what was too technical and what didn't make sense.

In fact, we put the respondents through this process three times to ensure that we were providing the community with accurate, thorough and truly thoughtful responses.  

Then finally, last night, we held a follow up session and provided these responses back to the community.

I wonder if as community members, you see the benefit to this two pronged engagement approach - that is, to hold one listening session and then follow it up with a response session.   In our belief, this not only maximises how much information we can gather from the community but it also ensures that we can get the right people to provide the right responses to the questions being asked.  

Do you see the value of this engagement approach?   Do you believe there is a better way, and if so, what do you think that is?    Have you been involved in this type of engagement process before and do you think it was successful?    Or lastly, have you been involved in a different type of process that you'd care to share with us? 

One of the biggest challenges I'm finding of late is when I deliver project information to community members and am met with responses such as, 'you're lying to us' or 'that's not true'.  

On 2 March, 2010 at the Melville Recreation Centre, Western Power held a community comments session geared towards the current Melville & Fremantle power options project.

The focus was to build upon previous community information gathering activities, so that a community output report could be provided to Western Power's technical experts and decision makers for consideration - here's a copy of the session output:  community comments session output and questions.

During my time with this project, one of the things that has constantly stood out to me is the great sense of distrust that I perceive some members of the community hold for Western Power.   Listening to the crowd during the March 2 session, along with reading materials such as the community comments session output and questions, various media articles or even a website created by one of the local residents has really got me thinking about how much project misinformation there is out there and on how a lot of this misinformation seems to stem from a place of distrust towards Western Power.

It makes me wonder how we can improve the relationship between Western Power and the community so that we can better work together towards providing sustainable power solutions for the entire community - both today and for future generations.

What do you think that Western Power should do?   Do you think that the community mistrust is really warranted or is it possibly misplaced anger and frustration driven by a dislike of major infrastructure within our local communities?

Do any of you have similar issues in your jobs and if so, what do you do to improve your customer relationships?