Wyndham City Council

Resilience Asset Mapping Tool

From discovery research to living system

July 2026

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The Research
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Built from 29 conversations about how resilience actually works in Wyndham.

The research

Semi-structured interviews with 29 participants across 17 conversations — council staff from seven departments, community sector leaders, First Nations voices, and long-term residents. Findings were organised across the four dimensions of the City Resilience Framework, with an ABCD relational lens: not just what exists, but who it connects to.

What kept surfacing

  • A gap between social cohesion and actual preparedness
  • A connector ecosystem that holds the system together — and is fragile
  • Barriers that compound rather than add up
  • Community-led activity that needs support without being changed by it

Why a tool

Staff across departments and community leaders converged on one need: shared visibility of what exists across the municipality. The mapping tool was built as the research's third deliverable — designed for council to own, update, and deepen independently.

The Problem
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Nobody can see the full picture.

The most consistent finding in the research. Valuable data — like language-spoken-at-home from MCH and kindergarten — sits locked in program-specific databases. Community members discover services through word of mouth, churches, and WhatsApp groups rather than council platforms. Teams doing related work can't see each other's efforts.

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interviews independently named the connector layer as how resilience actually works
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comprehensive maps of Wyndham's services, organisations and community assets — before this project
The Insight
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What holds Wyndham together is largely invisible to planning.

Wyndham's social fabric is primarily maintained by community, with council providing the platform. The system works — but it is person-dependent in ways that carry risk, and its most effective assets are the ones institutions can see least.

  • ~80% of activity in Wyndham's 19 community centres is community-led — 330–340 regular groups generating their own programming
  • The connector layer — bicultural staff, informal leaders, WhatsApp translation networks — extends the formal system's reach into communities it cannot access on its own
  • Person-dependency is the dominant structural vulnerability: one manager holds relationships with ~50 First Nations organisations; another, 35 cross-sector partnerships; another, 31 years of institutional knowledge. When they move on, the connections they hold dissolve
  • Whole networks operate through churches and informal organisations that neither council nor formal partners had connected with at all
The Tool · Assets
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A shared, living inventory — formal and informal side by side.

Screenshot of the Assets page showing the resilience asset inventory
115+ assets across 11 wards and four CRF dimensions Filter by ward, domain, community, population need Verification status and data freshness at a glance

Why it's built this way: the research found Wyndham's most effective assets are informal — and least visible to institutional planning. The register holds community-led groups alongside funded services, with verification workflows because staff trust in data was the recurring condition for use.

The Tool · Network
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The connections are the infrastructure.

Screenshot of the network graph showing connections between resilience assets
Referral pathways, partnerships, co-location, resource sharing Connector hubs surface; isolated assets become visible Where the system depends on single points of failure

Why it's built this way: the ABCD relational lens, made operational. In one workshop, a community group filled a whiteboard with sixty organisations they could name — then realised how few they could actually call on under pressure. The network view maps exactly that: where connection is deep, and where it is only awareness.

The Tool · Workshop
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Built in the room, with the people who hold the knowledge.

Screenshot of Workshop mode — the asset network ready for facilitated editing
Live facilitated editing — add assets, draw connections in session Automatic snapshots; every session preserved and comparable

Why it's built this way: the research showed information alone doesn't shift capacity — relationships and experience do. Letters about fire preparation went unread for years; doorstep conversations and staged mock emergencies changed behaviour. Workshop mode turns the whiteboard exercise into shared, durable infrastructure: the map improves and the relationships deepen in the same session.

The Tool · Gaps
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See what's missing before a shock finds it.

Screenshot of the Gap Analysis page showing ward coverage scoring
Ward coverage — growth areas start with fewer building blocks Sustainability risk — funding end dates on project-funded connectors Populations no asset serves well

Why it's built this way: barriers in Wyndham compound — transport, language, housing and awareness reinforce each other, and growth-area communities are "literally popping up alongside paddocks." Meanwhile the formal vulnerable persons register captures 20–30 people in a municipality of 360,000+. Gap analysis makes the space between formal visibility and actual vulnerability something council can act on — and natural-language search answers the questions no dashboard anticipated.

Why It Matters
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A strategy cannot operate on a snapshot.

Services open and close. Staff turn over. Funding cycles create and destroy capacity — and the connections between assets shift faster still. The research captured a point in time; the tool is how council keeps asking the same questions as the answers change.

Shared visibility

For the first time, staff across departments see the same picture of what exists across Wyndham — formal and informal, council-run and community-led. The tool directly answers the research's most consistent finding.

Relational mapping

Not just a list: partnerships, referral pathways, resource sharing, co-location. The network view reveals where the system is dense and resilient — and where it is thin and dependent on single points of failure.

Gap identification

Which wards lack coverage, which populations are underserved, which assets are at sustainability risk as funding ends. These gaps are the starting points for strategy prioritisation.

Where it sits: in the report's Spheres of Influence, the mapping tool is named within council's direct control — alongside the community centre platform model and follow-through on commitments. It was designed for council to own and update independently.

Thank You
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Thank you

Built by Paper Giant with Wyndham City Council, on research with 29 participants across 17 conversations — and designed to keep learning as Wyndham grows toward 500,000 residents.

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