Client profile

Moreland City Council represents Melbourne’s inner northern suburbs, with the vision for “a sustainable Moreland that supports a resilient community who live in an attractive, accessible and safe environment, with a strong local economy and services that meet their diverse needs”. 

Project context

Moreland City Council engaged Spark to lead the development of their youth strategy for the coming seven-year period. A fundamental design principle of this strategy is that it must be informed by young people in the community, schools, youth-focused service providers and others in the sector. Moreland City Council has recently developed an Oxygen Youth Centre, a hub similar to that proposed in this project, and a key outcome was to ensure this was best utilised in the coming years.

Solution

The stakeholder engagement to inform the youth strategy has been conducted by a process involving:

• Objectives sessions with Council;
• Stakeholder engagement planning workshops with Council’s youth brains trust, the Oxygen Youth Committee;
• Facilitated world café social innovation sessions with young people; 
• Focus group with service providers in the Moreland Youth Commitment Network;
• Design, dissemination, management and analysis of online surveys; and
• 1:1 interviews with teachers and service providers until critical benchmarks of repeat information were achieved. 

The outcome is a strategy that has truly been designed with young people at the centre, and which has an endorsement from a broad range of stakeholders. Furthermore, the strategy articulates Moreland City Council’s aspiration to move more into work at the system level, to drive positive transformational change for Moreland’s young people.