Council planning with integrated health and wellbeing

Alisha’s community wellbeing work involved connecting municipal health and wellbeing priorities with Council planning, implementation and organisational action. Her contribution included research, briefings, implementation plans and strategic advice.

Alisha’s professional records describe leading two Council Plan health and wellbeing planning cycles. She contributed to integrating municipal public health and wellbeing priorities into the Council Plan and action planning, interpreting requirements, agreeing responsibilities and developing indicators and reporting.

This work required planning across the organisation, bringing Council teams together to connect their responsibilities with the Council Plan and integrated municipal health and wellbeing priorities. Alisha linked research and community evidence with organisational priorities, coordinated input across functions and helped translate shared commitments into practical actions.

Alisha’s integrated planning work linked Council priorities and proposed actions with budget planning, available resources and the teams responsible for delivery. This involved considering what Council could deliver, where partner involvement was needed and how actions could be carried into organisational planning and reporting. The planning process connected health and wellbeing commitments with Council’s wider decisions about priorities and resourcing.

Alisha triangulated health research, demographic information and service-system evidence with community engagement to understand local health and wellbeing needs. The approach compared what datasets and published research suggested with the experiences of residents, community organisations and service providers, examining where these sources agreed, where they differed and whose experiences were missing.

Engagement with culturally and linguistically diverse communities and people experiencing structural disadvantage was central to this work. Community knowledge helped interpret the evidence and identify barriers to access and participation that aggregate data could obscure. Alisha used trusted community and service relationships, interpreters and translated information where needed to support participation, then brought the findings into priorities, actions and organisational advice.

Alisha supported evidence-based health priorities to be incorporated into the Council Plan, bringing research, local health information, community engagement and service knowledge into organisational planning. Her portfolios included mental health, food security, social connection, health promotion and homelessness prevention. Actions, indicators, theory-of-change approaches and reporting helped connect these priorities with implementation.

Alisha supported the Victorian public health and wellbeing priority framework through integrated Council planning, evidence review, cross-team coordination, action planning, indicators and reporting. The work connected statewide prevention priorities with local needs and the responsibilities of Council teams and health partners.

Her work included mental-health advocacy, local needs evidence, partnership coordination and community connection. Homelessness prevention and access to stable housing also informed her understanding of the conditions supporting wellbeing.

Her Play Streets work connected resident-led street activity with Council processes, safe participation and community relationships. This provided a practical contribution to active living alongside broader health and wellbeing planning.

Alisha supported food-security priorities and helped establish a Deakin University research partnership on healthier food options in community and sporting facilities, connecting research governance with municipal health planning.

The integrated planning work supported coordination across climate and health, violence prevention, tobacco-related harm and other prevention priorities. Her contribution was to the planning and organisational processes linking evidence, actions and reporting with the teams and partners responsible for delivery.

Her work on the Merri-bek Health Profile and analysis of Power BI dashboards connected demographic and community evidence with organisational priorities, outcome evaluation and strategic advice.

During implementation of the Homelessness Strategy, Alisha worked with colleagues to enter the four-year action plan into Council’s corporate planning system and establish an evaluation framework. This connected the adopted strategy with ongoing responsibilities and review.

The work included establishing governance arrangements for service coordination and a forum for examining barriers. Internal teams and service partners brought different knowledge and responsibilities into implementation, requiring clear roles, follow-up and reporting.

Soft Infrastructure can help translate a strategy into an action framework, identify responsibilities and indicators, and connect implementation with the organisation’s existing planning and reporting processes.