The City of Melbourne is developing a process and set of tools to conduct community safety audits in Royal Park.

The audits are exploring:

• People’s assessment of safety in 10 different locations within Royal Park (touching on interpersonal safety, cultural and gender safety, traffic and accident safety and other aspects of ‘feeling safe’).
• How people’s identities – as related to gender and sexual preference, Aboriginality, ethnicity, age, (dis)ability, socio-economic background, housing status, resettlement history and so on -- influence their experiences of and safety in public and social spaces.
• Recommendations for improving the safety of Royal Park through the broader Royal Park master plan process.
• Other topics that emerge in and through the research as important.

These themes will be explored with a range of community members with diverse experiences of Royal Park through a series of community safety audits conducted at ten ‘hotspot’ sites in Royal Park.

The audits will mainly be on-site in the park but some may be online or remote group discussions, depending on availability of participants.

The audit participation is limited and targeted to ensure an inclusive and diverse engagement. This sheet provides information and an Expression of Interest (EoI) form for those who might like to take part in an audit during April or May 2023.

You would be part of a small group of audit discussions, held over 1.5 hours. Each audit discussion will involve between 2 and 8 people, depending on the group.

Some audits will be held during daylight hours and others after dark.

All will be led by a trained facilitator and will be recorded using notes, audio recording and using photographs and short videos (with your consent).

Your contributions to the audit will remain confidential and none of what you tell us will be used in a way that can identify you to others, including Council, service providers, employers or others in the community.

Your information will be stored in accordance with Council’s policies.

There will be a summary report provided at the end of the project. That may include the use of anonymous quotes and photos that people have consented to having been taken. All other data (like demographic data) will be grouped and analysed before being used in the reporting to avoid identifying individual participants.

The report will be used to build the evidence base about safety in Royal Park, and recommend ways that we can improve safety.

No, participation in this project is entirely voluntary. Only those people who give their informed consent will be included. If you decide to participate but change your mind, you can withdraw your consent at any time during the process. And you can participate in some of the discussion but decline to participate in other parts, if you choose.

Please be advised that although we will take every precaution to maintain confidentiality of the data, the nature of group discussions prevents us from guaranteeing confidentiality in the group itself. We would like to remind participants to respect the privacy of your fellow participants and not repeat what is said in the discussion to others.

Unfortunately, no. There are limited numbers of audits and spots at each audit. Participants will be allocated to audits based on availability and on ensuring that we have a diverse group of people across all the audits. This may mean that you miss out on an audit spot.

There are other ways to participate, though, including via the Participate Melbourne page for the project. We encourage you to get involved and we will add all people who aren’t allocated an audit space to a wait list in case other participants withdraw or can’t make it.