Update on our recent happenings...

Our strategic plan is taking shape!  Following on from the public session we held in May, where many constructive comments were received, we have continued to meet fortnightly to develop the content.  We have been joined by new friends (Yusef Taibeh and Katica Puga) and old ones (Peter Johns, Mary Ann Jackson, Ralph Green, Anthony McInneny, Kieran McKernan, Ammon Beyerle, Edith Wong, Kamil Muhammed and Lynda Roberts) and even a founding member (Eva Riestra) residing in Sydney who many of us met for the first time.

Contributions from the expanded team of people have led to many new ideas, insights, and questions on what and where our organisation wishes to focus our services on, what are our values, what do we stand for, how we could make an impact on our communities, and whether we wish to keep the name ‘Architects for Peace’.   These robust discussions have been crucial in determining and justifying our evolving goals, objectives and the actions. Considering it’s less than 5 months since we embarked seriously on this exercise, the progress we have made in a such a short time is quite remarkable.

In order to gather thoughts and feedback from our members and supporters on what you value about our organisation and how we might improve, we sent out a survey in late April. We were unable to draw conclusive information from the results due to the small sample size, and have found our face-to-face engagement through our Melbourne meetings to be a more successful forum. We do however value our members outside of our home town, and will continue to strive to maintain our international connections, and get to know our overseas members. We would love to hear from you as to how we might do this better! We hope to continue to make opportunities available to you to make comments or to get involved as the first part of our strategic plan unfolds over the coming year.

Now that we are close to finalising our Strategic Plan, we are very excited that we can soon start preparing for its official launch in late Spring – stay tuned for more details coming soon!  If you’d like to know more about what we’ve been up to, you can read up on our submission to the City of Melbourne Homes for People Draft Housing Strategy 2014 – 2018 here.  

Once again, we would like to express our most sincere thanks to Sarah Davis, our amazing strategic planning facilitator, who has not only so generously guided us throughout this process but has also become a good friend of our group!