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Uniting Care Wesley Pt Adelaide

URPS has assisted the Family and Support Services Team at Uniting Care Wesley Port Adelaide (UCWPA) in a range of organisational development tasks.

Our involvement commenced with the facilitation of a two-day team building and strategic planning session. Following this we worked with small groups of staff involved in four specific program areas to develop action plans for their programs.

These plans distilled the actions needed to achieve program outcomes into simple steps linked to timeframes for delivery. Key roles and responsibilities for managing the actions were identified to assist with accountability.

URPS is providing ongoing support to the team in meeting the reporting requirements of their funding bodies in a way that optimises the input of staff without undermining their key role in service delivery. Assisting UCWPA with their organisational strategic planning has given URPS personnel a level of understanding of the organisation that has been vital to successfully undertaking other tasks. An example of this is the Communities for Children program, where URPS has assisted in undertaking the background demographic analysis and community consultation to input into a strategic plan for the project.

The Minister for Urban Development & Planning released the Ministerial Mount Barker Urban Growth Development Plan Amendment (DPA) in June 2010 for public consultation. This DPA proposes to rezone approximately 1300 hectares of rural land on the edges of Mt Barker and Nairne for residential and light industrial use.

With the aim of ensuring that its community was well informed and empowered to comment on the Ministerial DPA, the District Council of Mt Barker engaged URPS to run a series of information sessions for the local community. These six sessions were extremely well attended, with more than 300 people able to hear about and ask questions regarding the Ministerial DPA process and how to go about getting involved in this part of the planning system.

In a letter to the editor of the Mt Barker Courier, Jean Lovell of Nairne said that "Mt Barker Council is to be congratulated for its commitment to proper community consultation" and that URPS was "highly professional and responded in detail to questions in an articulate, honest and informed manner".

This is evidence of the success of these types of community information sessions and the goodwill and engagement that Mt Barker Council has fostered with its community through the process. We also believe that this type of process leads to informed and valuable input from the community to key planning initiatives such as this Ministerial DPA."