Croissants, coffee and graffiti spotting on Neighbour Day

A group of Southbank residents got together, practised reporting graffiti and celebrated Neighbour Day, on March 29, with coffee and French pastries as part of a community strengthening initiative by Neighbourhood Watch.

About 30 people from “a big mix of backgrounds” turned up for a recent Sunday morning event aimed at bringing residents together and familiarising them with the Snap Send Solve app for reporting problems to the City of Melbourne.

The app, which has been recently adopted by councils around Melbourne, offers a system for reporting graffiti, dumped rubbish or damaged infrastructure via a photo sent from a smartphone.

Chris Milner from Southbank Neighbourhood Watch, who organised the event, said six volunteers from the suburb’s walking and gardening groups had acted as guides for small parties of attendees who set off with route maps to scour the streets and snap and send any issues.

“The groups went out, they were led by the guides, and they took photos of the hard rubbish and graffiti and other things like broken pavements, etc,” he said.

“They had a map to follow, and they had a little spreadsheet-type thing to tick the box and note what they found. And they brought that back, and that was all collated by the City of Melbourne.”

The event was also attended by Cr Rafael Camillo, the City of Melbourne’s portfolio head for Safety and Cleaning.

After the street activity the whole group decamped to City Rd cafe A Treat of France, where they enjoyed coffee shouted by the owners and food thanks to the council, which had provided a Neighbour Day grant for the initiative. The café was very supportive, Mr Milner said, and the food had received very positive reviews.

The event was part of a larger plan Southbank Neighbourhood Watch had to help the community get to know their neighbours, which was the most important factor in their being empowered around safety and security.

Because of Southbank’s apartment-dwelling population, its lack of traditional community organisations and meeting places and its young, diverse, often itinerant and majority non-native-English-speaking demographic, it was necessary to “connect people in different ways”.

Neighbourhood Watch organises Coffee with a Cop sessions, where community members could sit down with officers from the Proactive Policing Unit, Mr Milner said, and also bike engraving, where licence numbers are etched into the bottom of frames so they can be identified if stolen.

Later this year he hopes to hold an event raising awareness about car theft, another of the most common local crimes.

Mr Milner lists bike theft, car theft, licence plate theft and the theft of items from cars as the most common offences in the area.

“Our job is to educate the community about all these things, but we have to get the community to connect, really, before we can do that,” he said.

Cr Camillo, who also serves as president of Residents 3000, thanked the event’s organisers and volunteers, the café owners and the community members for attending.

“Love seeing community spirit in action,” he wrote on social media.