Wyndham City Council
Mapping the networks that hold a growing city together
We worked with Wyndham City Council to refresh the evidence base for the Resilient Wyndham Strategy — deep engagement with 29 people across council and community, and a living map of the city's resilience assets, gaps and connectors.
Outcomes
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A living map of more than 115 community resilience assets across Wyndham's 11 wards, organised against the City Resilience Framework and kept current by Council
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Four cross-cutting patterns that reframe the Resilient Wyndham Strategy, from the gap between social cohesion and preparedness to the fragility of the connector ecosystem
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Research with 29 people spanning seven council departments, community sector leaders, First Nations voices and long-term residents
Services
A city growing faster than its networks
Wyndham, in Melbourne's west, is one of Australia's fastest-growing municipalities — around 350,000 residents today, heading past 500,000. Growth at that pace tests the everyday networks that connect people to each other and to help. Wyndham City Council engaged us to refresh the evidence base for its Resilient Wyndham Strategy: to understand what community resilience assets exist, how resilience is understood across council and community, and what actually happens when shocks hit.
Listening across the whole system
We spoke with 29 people across 17 conversations: council staff from seven departments, community sector leaders, First Nations voices, and long-term residents. The research combined Asset-Based Community Development — an approach that starts from the strengths a community already has — with the City Resilience Framework.
What we heard changed the strategy's own language. Community members consistently rejected the word "resilience" and reached for "flourishing" instead. The connector layer — bicultural staff, neighbourhood house coordinators and informal community leaders who link people to support — came up unprompted in 14 of 17 conversations. And around 80% of activity in Wyndham's community centres is community-led: 330 to 340 regular groups across 19 centres.
Much of Wyndham’s community life is self-organised — around 80% of community centre activity is community-led.
Four patterns that reframe the strategy
The synthesis surfaced four patterns. Social cohesion is real in Wyndham, but it doesn't automatically translate into preparedness for shocks. The connector ecosystem is strong but fragile: person-dependent, often project-funded, holding knowledge that can't be handed over. In the newest growth areas, barriers compound — transport, language, housing and awareness of services reinforce one another. And council faces a genuine design question: how to resource community-led activity without changing the fact that it's community-led.
Connectors — bicultural staff, coordinators and informal leaders — reach people the formal system often can’t.
What this means for the strategy
The findings give the refreshed strategy a distinct set of moves. Treat connectors as infrastructure, with permanent roles and succession plans in place of short-term project funding. Invest in bridging across communities as well as bonding within them. Design support around barriers that arrive together. And keep backing the everyday participation that crisis response depends on: preparedness grows from regular connection, long before a shock arrives.
Wyndham now has an evidence base drawn from the people who hold the city's networks together, and a living map of more than 115 assets it can keep current as the city grows — a foundation for a strategy that supports community-led resilience without getting in its way.
