Neighbourhood Centres are the cornerstones of our communities. They are inclusive and welcoming of everyone and provide invaluable community development activities and events that respond to the unique needs and priorities of their local communities.
Neighbourhood Centres provide critical social infrastructure, play a key part in building community connection and cohesion, and provide services and supports that help the lives of hundreds of thousands of Queenslanders that visit Neighbourhood Centres each year.
In recognition of this important role the Queensland Government partnered with the Neighbourhood Centre sector to create Neighbourhood Centres – our shared vision for a vibrant Neighbourhood Centre system in Queensland (PDF, 1.7 MB) | Neighbourhood Centres – our shared vision for a vibrant Neighbourhood Centre system in Queensland (DOCX, 929 KB).
Our Shared Vision establishes our goals for ongoing partnership between the Queensland Government and the Neighbourhood Centre sector, together we seek to build and strengthen our communities for the benefit of all Queenslanders.
Our Shared Vision was co-designed by the Queensland Government and the Neighbourhood Centre sector, through the work of the Neighbourhood Centres Strategic Repositioning Committee.
The Neighbourhood Centres Strategic Repositioning Committee consisted of a cross section of stakeholders with experience and knowledge of Neighbourhood Centres, their work commenced in May 2021 and was completed in December 2023 with the release of Our Shared Vision.
The Committee’s work has established a strong foundation for the ongoing growth of the Neighbourhood Centre sector and our commitment to working together.
There's over 120 Neighbourhood Centres in Queensland, and together they form the largest place-based social infrastructure in our state. A Neighbourhood Centre is place-based, community-led organisations with the widest open door to any community member who comes in with their strengths and skills and challenges, and then works together with their community to look at how we can solve our problems together and create new possibilities together.
Shared vision for Neighbourhood Centres is that there's a consistent service approach, a consistent operational model. The shared vision also includes that there's an ongoing partnership with Queensland Government.
Even though we're independent community-based organisations, what we have in common as Neighbourhood Centres is that sense of commitment to place, commitment to people, and commitment to making positive change.
A Neighbourhood Centre is actually the community heart. It provides a whole diverse range of services and products to community members. It could be simple as food for that evening meal, or it could be something much more complicated of teaching some of the elderly members of the community how to use the computer and how to access myGov services over the internet.
Our data collection is really important because it's not just about the numbers, it's about telling the whole story of the activities of our centre so that our funding bodies really do understand what it is that we do and what value we are adding to the things that they would like to achieve.
I don't think we've ever had the acknowledgement of how important because we haven't had kind of a program logic that has told the community and told government and other entities the value in what we do. So I think having a shared vision and shared program logic will give us a credibility and a platform from which to grow.
The co-design process for the Neighbourhood Centres was an outstanding opportunity for us to reimagine what centres might look like into the future. It provided hope about making the invisible visible, but also about resourcing things more appropriately to make sure that these centres move forward with great strength into the future.
Co-design has become a very popular term, and in some ways replacing terms like consultation and engagement. But it's also about how you bring together principles, process, and people.
The process has to be just as important as the outcome. And I think there was very good relationships built along the way, again, with the Department officials, but also amongst other organisations. It brought a lot of diversity, and then in itself that strengthens the process and the outcome. So both of those are hugely successful for what we now have, which is this great relationship and common understanding of both for the Department and the sector, what a Neighbourhood Centre is and what we should be doing and what we can achieve together.
Often it was one step forward and moving back a bit to recalibrate, reconsider, take on board new information.
We were guided by community voice. And it was such a well contained, well facilitated engagement experience that we really wanted to continue for the long haul.
Last reviewed:28 October 2024
Last modified:28 October 2024
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence
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