Why Canva chose Wollongong as its first city-scale global experiment
Dream big at wollongonggoals.org
Canva has come to Wollongong, not to sell software but to test an idea: can a technology platform persuade more people to engage in shaping the future of their city? The pilot will ask residents to nominate one goal each for their suburb, Australia and the world.
The initiative positions Wollongong as the first city-scale test case for Canva's latest civic engagement experiment. The Global Goals Platform asks a deceptively simple question: "What is one goal you would like to see achieved in your lifetime?" On the Wollongong-specific platform - wollongonggoals.org - Canva and Wollongong City Council hope, will reveal whether technology can draw new voices into conversations that governments have long struggled to broaden.
How it works
Residents submit their goals via wollongonggoals.org, with a name and suburb attached or entirely anonymously. Or there will be multiple chances to simply write your three goals on a postcard and share it with Canva. More details on events to come later.
Anonymous entries will capture IP address data under Canva’s privacy policy, allowing the council to report results at suburb level - a level of granularity the platform’s parallel US pilot, run with the Ad Council, won’t offer. But given the difference in scale between a city of 220,000 and a country of 340 million, that makes good sense. Results will be published as an interactive, real-time data visualisation as submissions come in.
Council’s general manager Greg Doyle said conversations began at the start of the year, and the pilot had been treated internally with more rigour than a straightforward marketing tie-up. Councillors, when briefed, raised questions specifically around governance and cost,
Mr Doyle said, and the council’s independent Audit, Risk and Improvement Committee was presented with the approach and was comfortable proceeding. The Office of Local Government has also been advised, with its chief executive asking to be kept informed as the pilot progresses.
Doyle set a rough internal benchmark of 15,000 to 20,000 responses for the pilot to be judged a success, though he framed the more important test as reach — whether the platform draws in residents the council says its conventional consultation, from public meetings to surveys to online forms, consistently misses. It’s designed to complement rather than replace those traditional processes: as Lord Mayor Tania Brown put it:
“We know there are voices we don’t always get to hear.”
The Lord Mayor named several groups specifically, including Wollongong’s growing Nepalese and Myanmar communities, the LGBTQIA+ community, and young people, as cohorts she believes aren’t showing up through existing channels.
Submissions close September 11, after which the results will feed into a public report checking the council’s four-year Community Strategic Plan - reset around four community-endorsed goals roughly two years ago - against what residents say they actually want now. Council has been clear that submitting a goal carries no guarantee of funding or action attached to it.
‘Open to dreaming big’
Canva co-founder and chief executive Melanie Perkins said the company had longstanding ties to Wollongong dating back to its earliest years.
“We ran some of our very first community workshops here in the very early days, long before most people had heard of Canva,” Perkins said. “The City of Wollongong has always been open to dreaming big.”
Hosting international sporting events such as the 2025 World Triathlon Championship Finals, the 2024 World Triathlon Cup, and the 2022 UCI Road World Championships adds extra credence to Ms Perkins’ statement.
Tale of two businesses
The significance of the partnership lies less in the mechanics of collecting feedback than in the organisations involved.
Canva remains privately held, but was last valued at roughly $42 billion in an employee share sale in August 2025, with co-founder and chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht telling an industry conference in February that annual recurring revenue was closing in on $4 billion. Analysts widely expect a Nasdaq listing, though the company has confirmed no date.
Wollongong City Council, by contrast, recorded that $10.2 million net operating deficit in 2024-25 and is funding roughly $379 million in continuing operations this financial year, largely through rates, which are rising 3.9 per cent.
Canva’s philanthropy in Africa
The Wollongong pilot sits inside what Canva describes as its Two-Step Plan - building commercial value, then using it “as a force for good” - and the company points to its work in Malawi as the clearest existing example of that principle in practice.
Since starting a partnership with GiveDirectly in 2021, Canva has donated tens of millions of dollars to fund direct cash transfers to people living in extreme poverty in Malawi, with the commitment expanding over time: a further $100 million pledge followed in October 2025, described by GiveDirectly as “the largest single gift in its history”. Early results from the program’s Khongoni pilot, reported by GiveDirectly, found that 90 per cent of recipients rose above the extreme poverty line within three months of receiving payments, alongside reported falls in child mortality and illness and a rise in school enrolment.