Ballarat Civility Exchange
A Ballarat Living Lab for everyday civility — learning where connection is breaking down, where it's already strong, and testing simple ways to strengthen how we show up with each other.
96 community statements.
4.2× more deposits than debits.
A city-wide listen to how Ballarat shows up with each other, drawn from the launch event in February 2026 — where civility is being built, where it's holding steady, and where it's wearing thin. The living lab starts here.
The relational bank is a way of seeing civility as something built or depleted over time. Every interaction is a small deposit, a small debit, or somewhere in between.
Strengthening the relational fabric of a city with a long history of standing up together
170 years after Eureka, Ballarat is stepping forward to tackle hard things together. The Civility Exchange listens to where trust between people is being built, where it's holding steady, and where it's wearing thin — and what it takes to build it back.
Read more →The Ballarat Civility Exchange
The Ballarat Civility Exchange is a place-based initiative led by the Ballarat Foundation, sitting within the national Reimagining Civility coalition convened by the Menzies Leadership Foundation. It brings local leaders, community members, institutions and funders together to strengthen the conditions for civility at a time when communities across Australia are grappling with division, polarisation and declining trust.
Ballarat has long been central to Australia's story of justice, representation and multiculturalism. The launch event on 18 February 2026 convened over 80 community members, local leaders and national partners. The session was facilitated by Ballarat Foundation Chair Ellen Jackson, with contributions from Sir Peter Cosgrove and Liz Gillies — their reflections framed the conversation in national context.
While those national voices set the frame, it was the voices of local community members that gave the Exchange its depth and resonance. Participants spoke openly about their lived experience, sharing moments where they had encountered intolerance, exclusion or been challenged by differing perspectives within the community. It took courage to speak so honestly. Their reflections grounded the Exchange in lived reality — and underscored why conversations about civility matter in Ballarat right now.
The goal is bold: to reimagine a more civil Australia with a unifying narrative about race and diversity, and a national platform for action that helps Australians engage constructively across differences and strengthen community resilience. Ballarat is one of the first places in the country to ground that ambition locally.
Full Register · 96 Community Statements
96 statements were collected at the launch event and classified across three states of the relational bank — overdrawn, in-between and in credit — to inform where experiments and investment are most needed. Synthesis by Ellen Jackson, Chair, Ballarat Foundation, 27 February 2026.
Withdrawals 15
- "What school did you go to" culture isolating newcomers and immigrants
- For single women it can be an isolating community
- Our systems exclude people who are just surviving
- Emerging leaders excluded from conversations that shape their community
- Gap in leadership capital for those outside established networks
- We no longer feel safe to say what we feel; differences evolve into insults
- Bystanders not intervening when they witness harm
- Withdrawing from difficult conversations rather than staying engaged
- Same voices, same tables in public conversations
- Funding competition preventing organisations from collaborating
- Architecture and street names not reflecting diversity
- Governance structures preventing proper community conversations
- Social networks reinforcing defensive, tribal conversations
- People emboldened online to say things they wouldn't in person
- Expectation of digital access isolating those without it
In-Between 18
- Moral grandstanding and performative non-compliance
- Aggrieved entitlement in retail and public settings
- Rebellious compliance: following rules while undermining them
- Transactional collaboration and tokenistic co-design
- Funding systems fostering competition over collaboration
- Leaders who understand change but haven't modelled it publicly
- Gaps between formal procedures and lived experience
- Informal connector roles operating without resourcing
- Opinions given the same weight as evidence in discourse
- Less open to difference than in the past — decline is itself a signal
- Community leaders not always acting as enablers of connection
- Youth have few meaningful options to contribute to civic life
- Challenge to engage across groups and media honestly
- Shared language like "safeness" and "assume good intent" emerging
- Self-organising groups mobilising without system support
- Leaders collaborating despite funding risk and competition
- Governance including lived experience — not yet proven
- The launch event itself — appetite, not yet sustained pattern
Deposits 63
- Rotating meeting chairs so those who wanted to Acknowledge Country could
- Organisations collaborating even when it puts funding at risk
- Schools holding complexity quietly, putting student needs first
- Individuals creating change at personal sacrifice
- Leaders modelling respectful disagreement publicly
- Modelling kindness — it spreads and it is noticed
- Speaking up when the tension is a crack, before it shatters
- Staying engaged when uncomfortable rather than withdrawing
- Asking curious questions to change disrespectful behaviour
- Putting others first in small, everyday interactions
- Leaning in to difficult conversations with care
- Asking hard questions to get to know someone better
- Teamwork and cooperation as civic values
- Love and respect as active practices, not feelings
- Yarning opportunities to listen across different lived experiences
- Reverse soapbox: arguing against your view to build empathy
- Sharing food as a universal connection point
- Community lunches across different suburbs
- Get-to-know-your-neighbours programs
- Face-to-face interactions countering digital disconnection
- Shared spaces supporting authentic connection
- Engaging genuinely with people outside your circles
- Cross-sector mental health collective (10+ organisations)
- Funding models rewarding collaboration over competition
- Pride in Eureka — Ballarat's history of constructive rebellion
- Visible celebration of difference: flags, LGBTQA+, religious diversity
- Shared spaces as platforms for connection (Lake Wendouree, Victoria Park)
- Ballarat Foundation's convening power and community trust
- Strong volunteer culture and community ownership of events
- Willingness to name harm as well as celebrate strength
Full register held by the Ballarat Foundation. Statements shown are a representative selection across each category.
Launch Event
Eighty leaders, twelve tables, national voices and local truth. Where the Exchange began.
Read →Thin
Between
Trust
The Relational Bank
Deposits of trust. Withdrawals eroding it. A place-based balance sheet for civility.
Read →LAB
A place-based laboratory for civility
Five everyday practices. Small experiments tested with partners across the city. Lessons shared back with the community.
Read →Where the room spoke honestly
On 18 February 2026, over 80 community members, local leaders and national partners filled a Ballarat heritage venue for the launch of the Civility Exchange. The session was facilitated by Ellen Jackson, Chair of the Ballarat Foundation, with contributions from Sir Peter Cosgrove and Liz Gillies. National voices framed the conversation — the importance of constructive engagement across difference at a time when communities across Australia are grappling with division, polarisation and declining trust.
Tables mixed long-time residents with newer arrivals, frontline workers with institutional leaders, people closest to harm with those with platforms and resources. Participants spoke openly about their lived experience — moments where they had encountered intolerance, exclusion or been challenged by differing perspectives within Ballarat. It took courage to speak so honestly. Their reflections grounded the Exchange in lived reality and underscored why conversations about civility matter locally, right now.
On the day, participants took part in small group table discussions, sharing experiences and identifying practical "deposits" that build trust in everyday interactions. These conversations highlighted the power of micro behaviours — listening with curiosity, extending respect, inviting others into dialogue — to shape the tone and culture of the community.
What the Exchange surfaced
96 community statements, classified across three states of the relational bank. 5 emerging themes connecting voices across the room. A shared language — credits, debits, deposits, in-between — for talking about civility as something concrete and testable. And the beginning of a community-wide commitment to treat civility not as an abstraction, but as lived, local, and built through relationships.
Through the Reimagining Civility initiative, the Menzies Leadership Foundation has convened a national coalition to make sense of the challenges and opportunities around civility, surface new insights and co-develop an inclusive response. The goal is bold: to reimagine a more civil Australia with a unifying narrative about race and diversity and a national platform for action that helps Australians engage constructively across differences and strengthen community resilience. Ballarat is one of the first places in the country to ground that work locally.
Civility as relational capital, built or depleted over time
The Relational Bank Model frames everyday interactions as deposits and withdrawals in a shared community account. Civility is not about being nice. It is a community's capacity to remain in relationship across difference, even when there is disagreement, discomfort or strain.
The three states
When the bank is overdrawn — you see harm and disconnection: mistrust, exclusion, silence, division. Civility is absent. At the launch event, Ballarat identified 15 withdrawals — patterns around exclusion, silence, structural barriers and online harm.
When we start making deposits — you see rebuilding trust: listening, openness, dialogue, shared understanding. Civility is emerging. Ballarat identified 18 in-between patterns, including performative behaviour, institutional friction, norms in flux, and fragile emerging deposits. This is where experiments have the highest leverage — the zone of transition where the system can tip either way.
When the bank is in credit — you see working together well: trust, inclusion, voice, shared purpose. Civility is strong and stable. Ballarat identified 63 deposits across collective action, everyday civility, connection across difference, and systems and leadership.
Examples of deposits
A respectful workplace conversation. A neighbour learning your name. Calling someone a "citizen" or "community member" rather than a "client" or "customer." A community enabler connecting two people who should know each other. A group rotating meeting chairs so those who wanted to Acknowledge Country could. Small, everyday, and additive.
Examples of withdrawals
Speaking over someone in a meeting. Online comments that dehumanise others. Excluding impacted people from decisions about them. Letting harmful behaviour slide without challenge. Small, everyday, and corrosive.
The bank model gives Ballarat a shared language. It turns civility from an abstraction into something concrete, countable and testable — something the community can invest in deliberately, not just hope for.
A place-based laboratory for civility
The next phase of the Civility Exchange is a place-based living laboratory — the community-based container in which civility practices can be tested, observed and refined. It is not a program, and it is not a scalable silver bullet. It is scaffolding — designed to grow the conditions for Ballarat to self-determine what it wants to do.
The living lab draws on parallels like the Kansas Leadership Center, where a small set of adaptive leadership behaviours have rippled across a place-based population over 20–25 years through community collaboration and multiple testing formats — not through program delivery. The goal is similar: to embed a small number of practices so deeply in local culture that they become how Ballarat shows up.
The five practices — how we show up in Ballarat
Stay curious
Ask before you judge. Stay open when it would be easier to close down.
Make relational deposits
Small acts that build trust — learning a name, keeping a promise, listening fully.
Name tension early
Speak up when the tension is a crack, before it shatters into something harder to repair.
Take one step
Test-and-learn. Try something small, see what shifts, adapt fast.
See your part in the system
Agency — recognise you're not outside the system, you are the system.
How the living lab works
Multiple micro-experiments run simultaneously across the city. Partners convene to share learnings. Insights feed back into the system. Over time, a growing portfolio of proven, locally tested approaches gets embedded in culture, policy and practice. The Foundation's role is not to deliver — it is to scaffold the conditions for others to experiment, and to hold the learning across experiments so nothing gets lost.
An example already forming — Federation University
Two separate meetings with Federation University came together within a day of each other. Nursing and Health Science researchers are building behavioural supports for workplace civility — teaching nurses to notice micro-signs of incivility and respond without being triggered, with the ambition of building a Centre of Excellence for Workplace Civility. Separately, the Student Engagement team is working on inter-group collaboration following recent racism and Islamophobia incidents. A triad is emerging: behavioural research, student groups willing to collaborate, and the Ballarat Regional Multicultural Council as the bridge to broader community and narrative shift. One experiment, hitting multiple enablers simultaneously.
Two-sided offering
Side 1 — Practices and capability: helping local leaders and community members adopt the five practices and build the skills to hold civility as a live, everyday commitment.
Side 2 — Experiment design support: helping partners structure, monitor, and learn from micro-experiments. Principles, observation methods, partnership agreements, and a shared learning rhythm.
Shift the conditions, and civility follows
If we cultivate environments where local leaders strengthen trust, compassion and connection — and intentionally focus on the good already happening — communities like Ballarat will model and grow positive social conditions.
We create regular spaces where Ballarat residents across difference can listen to each other, share stories, and name what is working and what is harming civic life...
People and organisations will see the relational bank more clearly, recognising debits they can reduce and credits they can build on — and making different choices in their everyday interactions.
We support small, practical experiments that test what moves communities from destructive or neutral patterns toward constructive ones...
Ballarat will develop a growing portfolio of proven, locally tested approaches embedded in culture, policy and practice — strengthening civility as relational capital over time.
The conditions that grow civility
The Civility Exchange identifies seven social conditions that together produce relational capital. Each is a lever — a place where deliberate investment, practice or policy can shift the whole.
The wheel is not a scorecard. It is a map of where Ballarat is assessing its strengths and stretch zones — a shared picture of the whole system, not just the loudest parts.
"Three local children transformed their street simply by learning neighbours' names, sharing small gestures and organising a community Halloween party."— Local leader, Exchange participant All voices →
The hidden infrastructure has no budget line
The most vital connectors in Ballarat are informal — and rarely resourced.
Full learnings →What Ballarat said, in its own words
A selection of voices from the 80+ participants at the Ballarat Civility Exchange launch event. Names have been withheld. Quotes are grouped by the state of the relational bank they illustrate.
Stories of harm
"My children encountered racial harassment in local workplaces — something they had never experienced growing up overseas. Attempts to address it through formal processes felt humiliating and ineffective."Parent · Ballarat
"We no longer feel safe to say what we feel. Differences evolve into insults rather than dialogue — and too often, we withdraw rather than stay engaged."Table discussion
"Our systems exclude people who are just surviving. Participation in conversations like this one is itself a privilege we need to name."Community worker
Stories of hope
"I responded to hostility with consistent openness and warmth. Over time, relationships shifted. I now run a free public activity that has become a hub of connection in my neighbourhood."Community member
"Three local children transformed their street simply by learning neighbours' names and organising a community Halloween party. Dozens of adults and children became more connected because of their initiative."Local leader
"A group rotated the meeting chair so those who wanted to Acknowledge Country could do so, despite grandstanding from others. Small act, big deposit."Table discussion
"Asking a curious question changed a disrespectful exchange in the moment. The tension was just a crack — we spoke up before it shattered."Facilitator
Language and leadership
"Calling someone a 'citizen' or 'community member' carries a different weight than calling them a 'client' or 'customer.' The words leaders use shape what's possible in the room."Institutional leader
"Public discourse increasingly rewards polarisation and sound bites. Nuanced disagreement is harder to sustain in environments designed for outrage."Table discussion
Who is missing
"Some community members are still surviving rather than thriving — and that affects their capacity to engage. People closest to harm are often underrepresented and overrepresented in emotional labour."Community worker
"Calls for civility can unintentionally expect marginalised people to carry more emotional labour — staying calm and generous while their humanity is questioned."From the room
What We're Learning
The Exchange surfaced five interconnected themes across 80+ voices and 96 statements. Each reveals something important about the state of Ballarat's relational fabric — and where the work ahead lies. Synthesis by Ellen Jackson, Chair, Ballarat Foundation.
01 · Stories of harm and hope live side by side
True civility requires shared responsibility and recognition of power. Calls for civility can unintentionally expect marginalised people to carry more emotional labour.
02 · The hidden infrastructure has no budget line
The most important relational infrastructure operates outside formal programs and funding streams — and is rarely recognised or resourced.
03 · Place matters — connection is shaped by physical infrastructure
Parks, lakes, libraries, cafes, clubs and community hubs act as platforms for connection. Workplaces, online environments and anonymous public spaces can become sites of tension.
04 · Language and leadership set the tone for belonging
Public language shapes community life. Leadership can preserve space for thoughtful disagreement — or close it down.
05 · Who is in the room matters as much as what is said
If we are serious about strengthening relational infrastructure, participation must widen and support must follow.
Civility is relational capital
Get involved
The launch event mapped where Ballarat stands today. The next phase turns those statements into practice — a place-based laboratory for civility, with five everyday practices, micro-experiments run with partners across the city, and insights fed back to the community. A 20-year ripple, grounded in self-determination.
Explore the Living Lab →Principles, tensions and next steps
Not being polite — the capacity to stay in relationship across difference, even when there is disagreement, discomfort or strain.
Three guiding principles
Emerging system-level tensions
The conversation surfaced tensions operating at multiple levels of the system. Naming these levels helps clarify where different kinds of action are needed. Progress at one level without attention to the others is unlikely to be sustained.
Interpersonal
How individuals show up in everyday encounters- Strong conversations and safe spaces
- The uneven burden of emotional labour
- Acts of goodwill alongside experiences of harm
Organisational
Workplaces, institutions and formal processes- Gaps between formal procedures and lived experience
- Institutional language shaping relational depth
- Informal connector roles operating without resourcing
Structural
Physical and material conditions shaping connection- Transport and accessibility influencing participation
- Civic spaces acting as platforms for connection or isolation
Power & Participation
Who participates, who carries the cost, who is missing- Underrepresentation in civic spaces
- Uneven distribution of civic and emotional labour
- The need to resource emerging leadership
System Coordination
How local and national layers interact- Local ownership within a national initiative
- Generative energy versus disciplined experimentation
- Conversation versus visible action
From insights to experiments — three stages
Listen & Map
Gather stories, name debits and credits, build a shared language about civility as relational capital.
Prioritise & Test
Identify the most promising in-between patterns and support small, practical experiments that move them toward credit.
Embed & Scale
Grow what works, embed successful approaches into policy and culture, share learning across sectors.