About community engagement
Community engagement describes all the ways we talk with the community about plans that affect your future.
Community engagement leads to better decisions for our local government area. We seek to understand the various interests, values, needs and perspectives of the people our decisions affect and use this knowledge to improve our plans and policies. 
Participatory decision-making creates a culture of shared responsibility and provides a forum for decision-makers and stakeholders to understand each other’s issues and viewpoints.
There are lots of ways you can get involved in engagement activities to learn more about what Council does, let us know your views and ideas and help make Wollongong a better place to live. We engage through in-person public consultation as well as digital engagement.
You will find information about how we carry out engagement at Council including our guiding policy, privacy information and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).
We invite you to sign up to get more involved.
If you would like to ask us a question, contact: engagement@wollongong.nsw.gov.au
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Community engagement for 2025
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2025 was a big year for engagement.
We had conversations with our community on more than 50 projects. Here’s some of our biggest ones:
- Our Wollongong, Our Future Community Strategy Plan 2025-2035
- Planning Proposal – Irvine Street, Gwynneville Precinct
- Pick your favourite image of Dapto!
- Help make our next Disability Inclusion Action Plan
- Planning Proposal - 190 Military Road, Port Kembla
- Botanic Garden Draft Masterplan 2025
- Locations for the Wollongong City Centre and Northern Suburbs skateparks
- Review of the Dogs on Beaches and Parks Policy
- Let's talk about play!
- Guide what's next for our pools and indoor sports facilities
- Help shape the future of our beach services and surf sports
Across our 50 projects, we heard close to 5000 pieces of feedback. This is just one way we hear from our community, and we’re very thankful for all of you who engaged with our team for 2025.
Our community’s conversations with Council’s engagement team increased significantly in 2025. We know this is because it’s reflected in the Our Wollongong website stats. You can see below our continued growth since 2020:
Definitions:
A visitor who is Aware has visited our online site and knows it exists.
An Informed visitor has visited our online site and then clicked on something else, such as another project, news article, downloaded a document, visited key dates or frequently asked questions.
Engaged visitors are those who have submitted a contribution, for example, posted a comment, submitted a survey response, voted in a quick poll, posted a story, asked a question, posted an idea or submitted a pin on places.
How did we support community engagement opportunities?
We didn’t rely on the website alone for community engagement and seeking input into projects, initiatives and programs. Here are some of the other things we did:
- Refreshed information stands at our 7 libraries.
- Regularly setting up our pop ups marque in community spaces like parks, beaches and in town centres.
- Visiting lots of community events and markets with our engagement stand.
- Creating new connections with community organisations, groups and state agencies.
- Introducing our ‘neighbourhood hubs’ to our website.
- Adding new topics to our e-Register of Interest, including our suburb lists.
What we heard from our community in 2025?
There were lots of topics we discussed with our community. Some of the themes we heard were:
- Outdoor spaces, including our parks, beaches and playgrounds are really important to our people. You want Council to make sure we’re making them clean, modern and fit for purpose.
- You asked lots of questions and shared your concerns about e-bike and e-scooter safety, given the increased use of them in the community.
- Transport and movement were a popular topic our community wanted to chat with us about. We had lots of questions about traffic, public transport routes, e-bike and e-scooter safety, and pedestrian improvements for all the communities we visited.
- You noticed changes in the environment due to climate change. You shared your valuable local knowledge with us about how the beaches, creeks and parks have changed over the past few years.
- You shared that you’re grateful for the services we offer, like our libraries, community facilities, youth services, waste and customer service.
What's ahead for 2026?
Our goals for 2026 include:
- Continuing our face-to-face conversations out in community and meeting you where you’re at. We heard our community appreciates this, so we want to keep it up.
- Increasing our registrations for neighbourhood Register of Interest – it means or community can receive an e-newsletter every time there’s an engagement opportunity in their neighbourhood.
- Returning to our suburbs we visited last year as part of our Let’s Talk expo series.
- Continue to take on feedback about what we can do to make our job support conversations with you.
- Refresh our engagement site and what it offers our community.
- Trial new ways to inform and engage our community on upcoming projects.
Thank you to everyone who got involved in our community engagement efforts over the course of 2025. We’re so grateful for the conversations and feedback we’ve had. We’re looking forward to what 2026 will look like.
If you have feedback you’d like to leave the Engagement Team, we’d love to hear it. Jump into our quick survey to share your thoughts on what we could improve - Tell us how we did | Let's Talk Wollongong
