Join Aleem Ali, CEO Welcoming Australia, Nina Taylor, Parliamentary Secretary for Justice, Rebecca Wickes (Griffith University), and Nicole Kalms (Monash University) to formally launch the Safe Spaces report, Engagement Blueprint and Engagement Toolkits.

The event will provide an opportunity for community organisations and local governments to discuss the report in the context of gender aware design of public places and spaces. There will be approximately 20-30 minutes for Q&A from attendees following the panel discussion.

About the Safe Spaces Project

The Safe Spaces project was developed to enhance the capability of local councils and other community focused organisations to engage women from diverse backgrounds to better understand why some public spaces and places are viewed as ‘unsafe’. The evidence gleaned from this project identified the physical and the social elements of public places that lead to feelings of worry and exclusion, which are foundational for the development of place-based strategies that encourage inclusion and safety for women. The project team engaged over 200 women living in the Melton, Monash and Wyndham city council areas. The women came from different ethnicities

and cultural backgrounds, different life course stages and had different abilities. They participated in surveys, focus groups, walking interviews and a co-design workshop to:

• identify their awareness of the problems in public places and the approaches needed to address them;
• understand their experiences in and around these places and the specific physical and social cues that are present, or indeed absent, in public places that lead women to feel unsafe;
examine the different strategies to improve safety in public places that emerge through a codesign process

The insights from the project point to the value of strengthening partnerships within and across local councils and highlight the need for the development of socially and culturally relevant strategies to engage diverse groups of women. In summary, the project reveals how different ways of engaging women to understand safety and inclusion reveal different aspects of the problems and different ways to solve them.