Promising practice portal

This was done by raising awareness about the issue and supporting the community to take actions that support women and men to participate equally in all spheres of public and private life. The project delivered a series of workshops aimed at women and girls and men and boys respectively.

Project development and delivery raised awareness across council about the role it has to play in preventing violence against women, and its responsibility to be more proactive about the safety of all residents, including those in the CALD community.

The key objectives of the project were the development of a resource for local government to foster equal and respectful relationships through the delivery of early years services, and to strengthen gender equitable skills and practices across Darebin early years centres.

The project was undertaken and delivered with the support and expertise of Women’s Health in the North, and with guidance from a gender equity project team. It has successfully developed audit and assessment tools based on evidence on safe, inclusive, and gender equitable early years spaces.

The program was designed to support new parents to negotiate their roles and to build knowledge and skills in equal and respectful relationships during the transition to parenthood.

The Baby Makes 3 Antenatal Pilot aimed to build awareness and understanding within expectant first time parents of how gender roles affect relationship equality, the importance of gender equality in new families, and why gender equality is important in preventing violence against women.

Baby Makes 3 was successfully transitioned into an antenatal setting in this project, with effectiveness and added value identified from being an existing Baby Makes 3 site.

It involved a baseline attitude survey active bystander training, an organisation needs assessment, and development of an action plan to guide councils’ work on the prevention of violence against women and gender equity.

It enabled councils to provide support to women experiencing violence whilst also addressing the underlying causes of violence with a view to prevent their occurrence in workplaces and in the broader community.

It has sought to do this in the same way that risk assessments are currently incorporated, with the toolkit being designed for council officers with no training in gender analysis and with an easy-to use feel that is not resource intensive.

The primary aim of the project was the development of gender equity action plans for CFA brigades and football-netball clubs in the two involved municipalities that were focused on practical activities to embed the principles of gender equality and the prevention of violence against women through lasting organisational and cultural change.

Individual transformational change of male and female community leaders was fostered throughout the project, and a ‘Rural Challenge Toolkit’ created to provide a replicable model to be used in rural and regional areas.

Rural Challenge was successfully delivered by Macedon Ranges in conjunction with the City of Greater Bendigo, Women’s Health Loddon Mallee, CFA District 2, AFL Central Victoria and AFL Goldfields. At the conclusion of the project, the ten participating organisations have a strategic roadmap and commitment to make organisational change informed by an enriched understanding of gender equality and preventing violence against women.

Rural Challenge demonstrated councils capacity to lead in this space, and to bring together diverse partners from a range of sectors to take a community development approach to this work. The availability of the toolkit provides a valuable resource for regional and rural councils and organisations wishing to undertake similar activities.

The project – delivered in partnership with Knox City Council, Yarra Ranges Shire Council, Inspiro Community Health, Together for Equality and Respect Partnership, and Outer East Children and Youth Area Partnership Steering Group – sought to develop local sporting clubs' understanding of the practical action they can undertake to promote and normalise gender equality and prevent violence against women in their communities.

In developing this understanding, Our Codes, Our Clubs aimed to encourage local sporting clubs to increase the number of initiatives they implement to promote gender equality and to create long term, structural, and cultural change within their clubs.

A gender equity audit was developed and distributed to all local sporting clubs within the 3 participating municipalities and the stories of some of the participating clubs showcased in an educational video produced in an advertorial format. The video was accompanied by a research report and fact sheet highlighting practical actions that can be undertaken by sporting clubs to embed gender equity.

The project aimed to create behavioural and cultural change within council by applying a gender equity lens to the way it recruits and allocates work, the way staff access conditions of the Award, EBA and organisational policies.

The resulting product, delivered in partnership with Banyule City Council, is a simple, three-page, user-friendly equity tool that can help to identify barriers to achieving gender equity within the workplace. Additionally, it can be used annually to audit employment practices and systems for gender equity.

It aimed to build workforce capacity to implement a whole of organisation approach to the prevention of violence against women and to embed a gendered approach to workforce development, policies, and practices.

Engaging multiple partners gave depth to the project and increased its applicability to a diverse range of audiences while simultaneously raising opportunities for its application to settings outside of local government.

In partnership with JMA Architects, the project aimed to ensure that Whittlesea’s community facilities are designed and built as safe, welcoming, and inclusive places that are respectful of and able to be equitably accessed and used by people of all genders.

The completion of the guidelines has created a tool to embed gender equity in community facilities and provides a resource to be shared, adapted, and built upon by all local governments.

The development of the design guidelines provided a mechanism to highlight inequality in the allocation of council facilities and council budgets, and was useful for progressing conversations about gender equity and PVAW more broadly among staff.