Victoria: The Place To Be

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Tools and Resources

Tools and resources to assist initiating and delivering community strengthening programs and projects are included here.

Using Local Data

Local or 'small-area' data plays an important role in helping communities to understand local issues such as access to services, social isolation, diversity and civic participation. It is also helpful in profiling communities and their health, education and employment characteristics.
The most useful data collections for community building are the census and other regular ABS surveys as well as data collected by Commonwealth, State and local government agencies. Research organisations with an interest in social issues are another source of useful data.

Getting to Know Your Community - A Guide to Using Local Data (PDF 902 kb) is a comprehensive resource designed to assist local communities and community groups access and review local level data in Victoria. Request a hardcopy of this guide by contacting us. The publication features an index of datasets that is useful for finding reliable and reputable data sources regarding numerous community-building themes and topics. Two popular data sources are the ABS' Basic Community Profiles and DSE's Know Your Area which both provide statistical data on Victorian regions, towns and suburbs.

Gathering Qualitative Information

Getting to Know your Community – A Guide to Gathering Qualitative Information (PDF 1346 kb) is a valuable resource in obtaining and using qualitative data. This guide offers a range of tools that have been used in recent community strengthening practice. Request a hardcopy of this guide by contacting us. It is a companion guide to DPCD’s other guide that assists communities in collecting local information: Getting to Know Your Community – A Guide to Using Local Data.

Working in Partnership

DPCD has identified five key features of effective partnerships in the Working in Partnership guide: a good broker, the right partners, clear objectives, good processes, and ongoing motivation. These features form the basis of the guide which offers practical advice and resources to help you run an effective partnership. Resources include: job descriptions, governance examples, conflict of interest guidelines, a communication strategy, meeting processes, MOUs and Terms of Reference documents and evaluation advice.

Indicators of Community Strength

DPCD has produced a number of reports on state and local indicators of community strength. For more information on these reports, copies for download and information about other community strengthening research, visit DPCD’s research and publications.

Community Strengthening and the Role of Local Government

Local Government is increasingly being viewed by many sections of the community as pivotal to building strong communities. Local Government's focus on locality, its closeness to citizens and its interactions with many different levels of government, community and private sector interests, places it in a unique position to inform the direction of future policy. To this end, Local Government Victoria commissioned Professor Mark Considine, from the University of Melbourne, to conduct a research project around the role of local government in community strengthening.

Three discussion papers were produced:
Community Strengthening and the role of Local Government (February 2004) (PDF 302 kb)
Building Connections: Community Strengthening and Local Government in Victoria (August 2004) (PDF 444kb)
Actions for Community Strengthening in Local Victoria (April 2005) (PDF 345kb)

Local Government Partnerships, Ideas and Action (PDF 1220kb) is an additional publication that can be viewed.

This page contains downloadable documents. In order to view PDF documents you will require Adobe Reader. To view other file types such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint and ZIP, other tools may be required.

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