Meet Your Street
Meet Your Street fosters stronger connections between residents in Monash neighbourhoods and positively impacts perceptions of safety (personal and property).
Benefits of knowing your neighbours
- It helps create an atmosphere of trust, safety, belonging and social connection in the local community.
- It can improve your health and wellbeing. Better social connection is recognised as a key way to maintain good mental and physical health.
- It helps with safety and crime prevention, so you know who lives where and who to call on in case of emergencies.
- And lastly, it can be fun and you can make some new friends
Ways to meet your street
We encourage you to be creative about how to connect with your neighbours. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Celebrate a cultural event together, for example, decorating your street with lights to celebrate Diwali (Festival of Lights)
- Organise a street clean-up
- Get creative and decorate your house number or letterboxes together
- Start a neighbourhood street library
- Create a communal compost bin
- Have a street party
For more information, read our Meet Your Street Guide(PDF, 4MB). You can also email mail@monash.vic.gov.au or call 9518 3555.
Background
Community safety is a major priority for Monash Council and is integrated across Council’s strategic plans. Monash is generally a safe community, but there was some concern about safety in some neighbourhoods in 2017.
As a response to this, Council formed the Monash Community Safety Special Advisory Committee. The Committee was asked to develop an innovative response to perceptions of safety in Monash.
The Committee established the Meet Your Street project, based on research that people who live in communities where they know their neighbours, regularly engage with one another and feel more connected are more resilient and often report feeling safer in their home and their neighbourhood. The project was allocated funding from Council’s 2018/19 budget.
Meet Your Street aimed to foster stronger connections between residents within local Monash neighbourhoods and to positively impact residents' perceptions of their own safety (personal and property), the safety of their neighbourhood and their safety within Monash. The project was focused in small precincts in Ashwood, Clayton, Glen Waverley and Wheelers Hill.
Residents living within the precinct areas were sent Meet Your Street postcards with information about the project and encouraged people to introduce themselves to their neighbours. Residents were then able to apply for a one-off grant of up to $500 to encourage and support people to meet their neighbours through local activities in 2019/2020.
Seventeen applications were received for Meet Your Street activities such as street parties, gatherings in local parks and building street libraries. Council also organised small neighbourhood events for local residents in the precincts to meet their neighbours and learn more about the project.
The activities were successful in building relationships and bringing neighbours together.
Meet Your Street grant recipients said:
- We met most of our neighbours, they brought their favourite dishes and we talked together about family cultures, lifestyles, careers and interests. I feel relationships have been developed, as this party was the catalyst to reach out to connect and communicate more. This is important to us to feel supported, connected and safe with the ones around us.
- Our street party brought 30 houses together on the night. We connected with our neighbours by providing the name tags, street number and phone numbers with each other on the night. Everyone came together with food, drinks and lots of kids and families. We stated to develop new connections and as a result we now say hello and wave to each other in the court.
- It was a lovely chance to meet members in our local community. The street feels more like a community. We would like this to be an annual event.
- Discussions were also exchanged in relation to thefts that have occurred on the street. Residents did express that knowing the neighbourhood will help create an atmosphere of trust, safety, belonging and social connection in the local community.