Community engagement, also known as public participation, is about getting people involved in decision-making. It is at the core of our democratic processes in local government.

The City of Parramatta Council is committed to engaging everyone in our community about the things that matter to them, in a transparent, open and accountable way.

More than 250,000 people make Parramatta their home, and we’re a fast-growing and diverse community. By 2036, our population is forecast to grow to more than 443,000 people. More than half of our population speak a language other than English at home and almost half were born overseas. We recognise the Darug peoples as Traditional Owners, part of the oldest continuous living cultures in the world, and are committed to working together on matters of land, water, language, culture and cultural heritage. We also recognise that we have vulnerable and hard to reach groups in our community who may have special needs or barriers to participation.

Our Community Engagement Strategy guides how Council will engage with everyone in the community.

We believe it is important that the community can see and have a direct impact on Council’s decisions that shape our City. We want to ensure our projects and plans reflect community needs and priorities.

We have updated our Community Engagement Strategy to incorporate requirements under the Environmental Planning & Assessment Act 1979 (the EP&A Act). Under the EP&A Act, planning authorities such as Councils must outline how and when they will engage the community about planning functions like policy making and assessment. Our Community Engagement Strategy covers non-planning matters too and has also been developed according to requirements set out in the Local Government Act 1993.

We are committed to engaging with the community at key points in projects. This can be at the planning or project delivery stages, and also receiving ongoing feedback on the services we provide.

Some examples include our library services, skate parks, parks and reserves, roads maintenance, capital works projects, strategies and development applications.

Our aim is to foster a culture of collaboration with our community.

We are committed to providing opportunities for everyone in the community to participate and ‘have a say’. Our Community Engagement Strategy supports providing information in accessible formats, using a variety of engagement methods, and ensuring venues are accessible.

We encourage inclusive community participation by, for example, using easy to understand language, providing translated resources, language workers and help at events, and meeting the commitments outlined in our Reconciliation Acton Plan (RAP) and Disability Inclusion Action Plan (DIAP).

We have committed to a series of actions to ensure we deliver the objectives of the Community Engagement Strategy. These actions include taking an organisation-wide approach, ensuring all non-administrative projects have a community engagement component, providing staff with ongoing engagement training and support, using best-practice online engagement tools, and conducting annual community and stakeholder research and community satisfaction surveys to help improve decision-making and monitor the effectiveness of our engagement.

The Community Engagement Strategy details how we will engage with stakeholders and the community, and how you can have a say on projects that impact you or that you are interested in. We are striving for a best-practice approach to engagement to help us to create more liveable communities, better public policy and ensures people are at the core of what we do.

The Community Engagement Strategy provides a framework for how Council will engage on plans and policies so the community knows what to expect and has an opportunity to provide input. The key elements of the Community Engagement Strategy include:

• how and when the community will be engaged across planning functions – as per the EP&A Act requirements
• more detail about the engagement process such as:
  • our engagement principles
  • who we engage with, when and how
  • what engagement looks like for the City of Parramatta
  • a series of overarching strategies, objectives and actions to help implement best-practice engagement
  • how we will measure our success.