Our 2023-2024 year in review!

We recently published our Impact Report 2023-2024 to showcase 12 months of busy advocacy and advisory work at Victoria Walks!

The year began with the welcome survey finding that our role as an advocate for walking and trusted expert is highly valued by staff at our stakeholder organisations, which includes councils, government agencies, and private businesses working in areas such as health, planning and transport.

Our stakeholder survey respondents singled out our policy advocacy to government and our media presence as being particularly helpful. The 2023-24 year saw us highlighting the importance of walking access for improving equality in our cities, suburbs and towns.

We made 345 media appearances, with urban speed limits and e-scooter policy among the hot topics where we were asked to provide comment and context.

In 2023-24 we extended our accessible walks auditing and promotion service. With support from the Victorian Government, we partnered with Disability Sport and Recreation and Regional Sport Victoria to extend our catalogue of accessible walks to include 17 trails in Victoria’s west. We also audited and promoted accessible walks for City of Stonnington and Parks Victoria.

We began a data analysis service, providing City of Maribyrnong and Peninsula Health with a comprehensive picture of travel behaviour in their municipalities. This service is in addition to our publicly available research reports.

Over the year we explored new channels to disseminate our research. We presented the findings of our Lighting in Public Space research paper direct to staff at 13 councils. The report was commissioned by solar lighting company Leadsun, which facilitated the presentations.

Among other notable partnerships, we ran a successful Walk, Scoot and Ride2School Day for City of Yarra and created communication templates to encourage active transport to school and safe driver behaviours around schools.

We continued to inspire everyday Victorians to walk more through our popular newsletter and social media channels.

In addition to sharing our digital Walking Maps (which had over 900,000 views) we also used our Facebook and Instagram pages to champion walkability. We interviewed 16 people across all life stages and asked about the built environmental and other factors that help (or hinder) them when deciding whether to choose walking to get around their commiunities as part of our onging #LoveWalking campaign.