The City of Melville is encouraging local individuals and business owners to band together to improve and strengthen the social environment of their neighbourhood.

Project Robin Hood is a community-powered initiative providing $100,000 towards funding successful ideas that make the Melville community a more united, vibrant and safer place. 

City of Melville Mayor Russell Aubrey said the council wants to support and deliver projects and events that make the neighbourhood a better place.

“We encourage individuals to start sharing their ideas with family, friends and people in the neighbourhood,” he said.

In 2018, the local community voted in eight projects which were approved for funding including a local market for young entrepreneurs, court resurfacing at the Troy Park netball courts and a free speech pathology project for parents with children under the age of three.

Palmyra Primary School received funding in 2017 and 2018 to build a vegetable garden called the ‘Polly Patch,’ an outdoor classroom deck also used for community events on the weekend and a nature play tree deck.

Palmyra Primary School Principal Hugh McCrackan said the motivation to submit an application for the funding was driven by the community who were proactive in establishing these outdoor areas.

“The community is actually really important because we [as a school] can’t do it all alone,” he said.

“The community and the school wrote the application together because we had a shared vision of what we wanted to do and how we could incorporate the community into our school and the project is a really wonderful way to do it.”

Without the funding, Mr McCrackan said the school would not have had enough money to support their vision.

“Schools never have that excess money that you can do special projects with. We love the Melville Council’s Project Robin Hood because they share it out among the schools and give us access to something we wouldn’t normally come across,” he said.

The Polly Patch surrounds the outdoor classroom deck and includes several vegetable garden beds, olive trees, fruit trees and a pizza oven.

Mr McCrackan said these outdoor areas gave them a place for authentic learning.

“It gives us something extra so that we are just not a school with four walls,” he said.

“It can’t get any better than that.”

Project applications through Project Robin Hood have closed, however, voting opens later this month.