Participatory Melbourne

Participatory Melbourne is building experiments and scaling solutions which generate community agency, increase trust, create connectedness, and inspire participation and action.

The complexity of our social and environmental challenges need robust, nuanced and integrated responses. We are past the point where hero leadership, binary thinking and single point solutions are enough. In this context of social fracturing and environmental crisis, participatory processes become an integral component in the regeneration of our city. Put simply, we won’t redirect power and capital towards regeneration without active and purpose-oriented citizenship.

We recognise that the integrated challenges of our current economic system make the act of participation itself, difficult for many. We are exploring this, and many other questions, with our partners.

There are many existing actors working on these fundamental questions, and plenty of local research to support this work. Participatory Melbourne builds on this existing ecosystem and seeks to co-create even more ambitious and systemic interventions.

Why this matters:
“The deep why of participation is to move from apathy to agency”
- PM workshop participant

Current goal:
A thriving civic life.
Tangible goal in development.

Current phase:
Validation of insights, research + systems mapping

Across 2022, a small number of Regen Melbourne alliance members began to gather to explore the role and significance of active citizenship in the regeneration of our city. This group included foundational alliance members Coalition of Everyone and Small Giants Academy, alongside the Australian Leadership Index at Swinburne University, and the Menzies Foundation.

By the end of 2022 it became clear that our informal conversations required a more formal sandpit and the enrolment of many more actors and researchers! And so we began to map out an exploration phase throughout 2023, involving a series of (participatory!) workshops with alliance members. These sessions are designed to map out the participatory ecosystem in Melbourne, surface insights and reflections, and uncover new pathways to action.

This series of workshops led to a design forum in mid-2023 which laid out the creative pathways we need to explore, collectively, to support active citizenship, trust and agency across the city. From here, we synthesised all the insights and experiences into a view on how we might be able to take this work forward. See our blog below on Learning, Seeing, Doing Participation for a snapshot of these findings and sense making to date!

The end of 2023 sees us validating these insights and findings through research, co-design activities and systems mapping work, in order to develop something tangible that helps us see what the ecosystem for a thriving civic life might look like. We hope this will lead to some potent activations surfacing into 2024.

Lead Convenor:
Caroline Sanz-Veitch

How to get involved:
Email caroline@regen.melbourne to find out more about the initiative.

Keep an eye on our upcoming events to get involved.

If you are an organisation working toward a thriving future for Melbourne, join the alliance to help co-create pathways of action across our city.

Or subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date on project announcements.