Maximising community engagement - case study: Melville and Fremantle

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?