FAQs

The City of Marion wants to improve the way we seek out, facilitate, and report on public involvement in decision making. We are particularly keen that any new approaches that are developed have a focus on community engagement that includes people who are representative of the diverse make-up of the City of Marion’s residents and ratepayers. 

If we are to improve the way we engage with our communities, we need to involve them in shaping what that needs to look like. Rather than undertake a ‘business as usual’ approach to involving the community in this review process, we are using the opportunity to try something different. Enter Marion 100! 

Marion 100 aims to bring together 100 people from across the city to discuss how the City of Marion can improve the way we engage with our communities in our decision-making. These 100 people will be representative of the people who live in the City of Marion and will include both ratepayers and residents. 

•  Being a part of Marion 100 is as an exciting, unique volunteering opportunity to get involved in civic life – helping shape the future city! 
• You’ll meet 99 other local people also keen to get involved in city life!  
• All participants will receive a Mayor’s Certificate of Participation – anyone building their resume! 
• You’ll have a yummy afternoon tea provided by a local business! 

Our experience is that the way we’ve been consulting to date, means that we generally hear from the same people, or the same type of people. Whilst these people have a very valid and important contribution to make, we know that our city is a diverse place with so many different people living, working and visiting here! 

We are therefore making a big effort to invite people who represent the diverse demographics in the City of Marion to come together and tell us how we can better connect in the future. 

The concept of Marion 100 has come about because we are currently reviewing the way we involve our communities in our decision making, and we want to try something different in doing this. The 100 people will provide us with ideas and insights about how we might better involve people, that we might not have thought of. 

Whilst this is a one-off event at this stage, the 100 people might tell us that it’s been a great experience and that this type of representative process should be used more often to help us making important decisions. We might feel the same. We are open to all pathways forward! 

We will use information provided by idcommunity based predominantly on the 2016 Census to form the group. Our aim is to ensure that Marion 100 is representative of the City of Marion community in terms of gender, age, suburb, language spoken at home, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander status. 

We will also be keen to ensure that different interest groups are represented (such as business owners and operators), people with a disability, and people with interests across topics such as the environment, the arts, heritage, sports, service clubs, faith groups, and more are represented. We are keen for Marion 100 to include people who have previously been involved with consultations, and those who have never been involved. 

We will be seeking Expressions of Interest to be a part of the Marion 100 event through a range of techniques and inclusion in our rates notices, in addition to this we will use our existing communication channels to share the opportunity to express an interest to be involved. 

 To reach the level of diversity needed, we will also work closely with our staff and partners to use their networks to encourage people to express an interest. We also intent to approach key community-based organisations (such as youth groups, multicultural organisations, ATSI groups, business associations) to promote to their networks and encourage expressions of interest to be submitted. 

An open Expressions of Interest process is being held inviting all residents that live within the City of Marion to register to be considered. This open invitation process is being used to ensure we gain a good ‘pool’ of respondents.

The expressions of interest process will be managed independently by community engagement consultant, Becky Hirst. Panel members will be randomly selected by Becky Hirst to ensure a descriptively representative sample of the City of Marion community are involved. Names and contact details will be removed during the selection process as the selection will be made based on demographic data only. Council is not involved in the selection of the Marion 100 representatives