Thursday, August 20, 2009
MEDIA RELEASE Cradle Coast NRM to strengthen community relationships Cradle Coast Natural Resource Management (NRM) is seeking community input into a project that will help strengthen its relationships and communication with the regional community. Known as the Social Benchmarking project, the aim is to identify what community awareness and perceptions of the organisation are, so that they can be monitored and used to improve planning, according to Cradle Coast NRM’s Executive Officer, Richard Ingram. “For this reason we are calling for the assistance of NRM networks across the Cradle Coast to help us determine what our relationship with our community is now, and how can we get better in the way we work together ‐ we are essentially looking for ways in which we can improve,” he said. “The success of the Social Benchmarking project will ultimately rely on the confidential responses we receive from our community”. In order to survey the region, NRM Project Managers, James Shaddick and Belinda Colson, are working with Dr Mark Fenton from Environment and Behaviour Consultants (EBC), who have extensive national experience with similar projects. The project will consist of one survey for each of the following categories: urban population; marine resource users; rural land managers; stakeholder organisations; and the ‘Care’ groups which include Landcare, Coastcare, ‘Friends of’ and other interest groups. Project questionnaires will be delivered by phone and mail, on a random selection basis. Richard said all responses would be confidential and no individual information would be retained. Further information: • Cradle Coast NRM Social Benchmarking Project Officer: Belinda Colson Media: Allison Hicks
www.nrmtas.org/whatsNew/cradle/latestNews.shtml bcolson@cradlecoast.com or 03 6431 6285 ahicks@cradlecoast.com or 0414 077356