Apartment Social Cohesion Project

Lane Cove Council is running another iteration of the Social Cohesion project for apartment buildings and looking for our next apartment buildings to participate.

Residents who live in apartments are less likely to be engaged with their neighbours and less likely to call on their neighbours for help in times of need. This program aims to increase relationships and overall social cohesion with neighbours to creates a more cohesive community. In 2022 and 2023 we piloted a series of engagements with residents across three apartment buildings to increase connectedness among residents, engage residents in identifying local resilience issues where they will take ownership in prioritising, planning and implementing solutions for themselves. This led to the Meet Your Neighbours toolkit, all achieved with funding from the Premiers Department. Previous rounds of the project have led to results such as a created whatsapp building chat of residents, social groups forming including walking groups, regular social events, and safety workshops such as first aid training or fire warden training.

The program will be delivered in the style of 3 events held on site at the building in a common area such as a community room or an outdoor covered space, following the below plan.

• Event #1 Meet your neighbours themed event including activities and games to get to know other residents in the building.
• Event #2 Identifying resilience or safety issues experienced or identified by the residents.
• Event #3 Reviewing the prioritised issues and brainstorm how they can be addressed and actioned by the residents.

Building managers/the strata committee should be made aware of residents wanting to submit an EOI to this program and it would also be recommended to have their contact details as the program may require information shared with them, such as event date/time to assist with promotion, supporting in booking/use of common spaces in the building as per their normal procedures, or final results of the program.

Meet Your Neighbours activities and catering for events will be funded by Council through the event delivery, but depending on the issues and actions, some may need to be passed on to the building manager or strata committee for future consideration, others can be resident led and delivered actions.