Case study | Community Views on the Northern Beaches

In 2022 and 2024, our consultants conducted the Community Views survey with Northern Beaches residents to support Council planning, policy and advocacy work.

What Northern Beaches learned:

• The Northern Beaches local area is highly liveable, with good levels of natural amenity and high levels of safety.
• Despite the community feeling largely safe where they live, the need to feel safe increased in importance between 2022 and 2024, driven largely by women.
• Cost of living and housing affordability were key issues in the community, and residents’ perceived financial circumstances had dropped.
• Due to financial pressures, the importance the community placed on shopping, leisure and dining experiences fell.

Linking liveability attributes as measures of progress against the Community Strategic Plan and Community Wellbeing Framework:

The Community Strategic Plan captures the community’s vision, aspirations and goals for the local area, as well as targeted strategies to enable the aspirations to be achieved and measures to track success. The Community Wellbeing Framework is the Northern Beaches framework for monitoring and evaluating collective impact towards wellbeing.

Northern Beaches Council used the 2022 insights and data from the ‘Living on the Northern Beaches’ survey as explicit measures of progress against its strategic goals. For example, as part of its ‘Community and belonging’ outcome, Northern Beaches established that eight measures from Living on the Northern Beaches would indicate progress towards this overall goal, namely: ‘Cultural facilities’, ‘Feeling safe’, ‘High quality health services’, ‘Opportunity for all’, ‘Social cohesion’, and perceived levels of ‘Physical, and mental health’ and ‘Social wellbeing’.

In addition, as part of the ‘Liveable’ pillar of the 'Community Wellbeing Framework’, Northern Beaches Council identified the following measures as important signposts of progress in that area: ‘Affordable decent housing’, ‘Feeling safe’, ‘Access to the natural environment’, the ‘Liveability Index’ and the ‘Wellbeing Index’.

Examples from the strategic documents are shown below..

Want to find out more?

Community Views is an independent, robust and repeatable community survey that helps local councils and other organisations to credibly, comprehensively and efficiently represent their community’s views and needs in policy and advocacy. Book an introduction here.