Recently, in the development of The Collective’s second Strategic Plan 2017 – 2020 the current Committee took the learnings of the previous three years to inform a refined Plan for how they felt they could best serve, and achieve their goals, for their community.

Collective Chairperson Kat Wray said “We reviewed our strategy, which allowed us to evaluate whether we were delivering what was intended, and to clarify whether we still wanted to achieve the same goals.

“The Committee only retains one founding member, but really the overall aims of the original Strategy were still important to us. But the review was a good opportunity to refocus, and shift some of our efforts to ensure we are achieving all of our goals.”

The new Plan defines four key pillars: Creative collaboration; Community connectivity; Inclusivity; Sustainability.

“We’d ended up running a lot of events, and all of the other things we wanted to achieve were taking a back seat. So now we’ve rebalanced our approach so that we still get to deliver the events, which we all enjoy doing, but we’re also ensuring our events tick boxes in our other areas of focus. Plus we’re devoting time to working on other strategic activities we believe will benefit our community.” Said Ms Wray.

Bringing together residents, businesses, community groups and the Council to contribute to encouraging a thriving cultural scene is a core element of the strategy, as the Collective recognises the contributions so many people and groups make to their community and wants to see as much achieved as possible from all of that effort.

Being social connectors who bring people out of their homes and into public spaces to participate in shared experiences, is important in itself and also gives the Collective the opportunity to be a sounding board and advocate to the Town about local issues and initiatives.

Inclusivity of all types of people from all backgrounds is an important present and future aim, the Collective continues to cultivate for their community.

Environmental sustainability is also an important part of what the Collective does.

By incorporating sustainable practices into everything they do, they are educating their community on simple ways they can take care of their homes, families and the planet.

“The various Committees have achieved some great things over the life of the Collective, which we’re all really proud of.” Ms Wray said.

Improving the environmental sustainability of the Town is one of the core values of the Collective, and projects they’ve worked on include Plastic Free July campaigns, a wash station to enable BYO food implements at events, and car free day events to bring people out onto suburban streets to make surprising uses of the open space.

The Collective has been able to make a very tangible and long lasting contribution to the fabric of their Town’s cultural scene through art, murals and parklets. A series of murals were developed through workshops with artists and local art enthusiasts, and these then became the stops on a self-guided arts trail made available in print and on the Collective website.

Work on streetscapes, place making and bringing people out into the street to engage with their community included taking on the tender to develop the Town of Victoria Park’s Urban Forest Strategy and consulting on and building Parklets to encourage casual public use of spaces on Albany Hwy.Improving the public domain is an area the Committee is currently focusing on.

The Collective has always taken an active lead in coordinating events for their fellow residents, with the aim of contributing to the evolution of their culturally vibrant and interesting Town. They focus on socially responsible and constructive events, which provide opportunities for people to connect and socialise while doing something for their community, learning something new, and of course having fun. Events take a range of forms and sizes and many involve collaborating with other local groups, to bring together complimentary skillsets and varied audiences.

“Collective Conversations, described as like TED Talks with drinks, are free pop up talks at local venues (usually pubs) where people can hear specialists in a field speak on their topic of interest. Talks have included a Meet the Candidates during local elections, Trees in da Hood and Plastic Free July Challenge.

“Vic Park Soup is a micro-granting dinner where residents and guests pay $10 and come together in a local venue for soup, a roll and a vote. Over dinner 3 to 5 social enterprises servicing the local area do four minute pitches, diners cast their vote and the winning pitch takes away the funds raised to help with their works.

“The largest event the Collective has gotten involved with is the Vic Park Summer Street Party. It was previously a smaller family Christmas event run by then Town, and in 2015 the Committee and volunteers got involved and helped turn it into a much larger street festival for people of all ages. The new event is attracting huge crowds and is really well received by the community. It does take a lot of hard work, and for a volunteer-based organisation that can be difficult,so we have to manage that carefully.

“One of our big challenges has actually been finding and managing volunteers. They’re hard to engage and then once we have them interested the timing doesn’t necessarily align with when we have work available for them. We’ve also seen volunteers get burnt out quite quickly, when working on a big event like the Summer Street Party. So, we need to work on our process for managing volunteers in the future.” said Ms Wray.

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