Growing Brimbank reports

Growing Brimbank is a long-term collaborative program between Mitchell Institute, Victoria University and the City of Brimbank. It aims to lift health and education outcomes in the local community by harnessing the strengths and tackling the challenges through a place based program.

This will enable policy makers, service planners and partners providers, funders and residents to work together towards building a more successful and prosperous community.

The following publications focus on:

• the evidence directing the change and  the suite of foundation reports
• the outline of the program and the prospectus for our work.

Foundation reports

A suite of foundation reports, which underpin the Growing Brimbank program, have now been published.

They are:

• The Brimbank Atlas of Health and Education 2014 (PDF, 2.96 MB)
• Physical Activity, Sport and Health in the city of Brimbank 2014 (PDF, 1.33 MB)
• The Brimbank Spatial Map of Physical and Social Infrastructure 2017. (PDF, 3.68 MB)

Together, the reports provide an unique and comprehensive description tailored for a specific community about:

• priority health and development risk factors, and if unaddressed
• Impacts in later life on social inclusion, productivity and wellbeing
• underlying factors driving poor outcomes - such as socio-economic inequities, low capacity and capability to make healthy choices and poor access to physical and social infrastructure that promote good health and wellbeing.

Using nationally or locally replicable data, these reports can be repeated over time and place. They provide the baseline for determining best value investments and for informing policy frameworks and service models to implement and sustain change both locally and for other similar communities.

Who should use the reports?

The suite of reports should be used by community planners, policymakers and practitioners.

Together the reports provide the resources and ‘tool kit’ for

• understanding the evidence of risk factors affecting the foundations for well-being and prosperity
• identifying system failure points
• accessing information about the capacity and assets on which to build prevention and early intervention strategies
• framing the opportunities for risk mitigation
• making decisions about the leverage points where the  best evidence of ‘what works’ can be effectively applied to address or reduce the impact of those multifactorial issues and risk factors.

This report summarises the key findings of the Brimbank Atlas and Physical Activity reports.