Scott Hilditch

Scott Hilditch has a long history in working in the community sector having been the Senior Program Manager of Keep Australia Beautiful Victoria for 10 years developing and coordinating numerous community awareness programs and campaigns.

These program included Tidy Towns, Adopt-a-Highway and Sustainable Cities to name a few. Scott gained an interest in tackling the issue of graffiti from a community level while managing the Stationeers – ‘Right on Track’ program and noticed that graffiti vandalism was being tackled in a miss-matched way by government and industry little to no involvement that it effects the most, the community.

After discussions with Keep America Beautiful on permission to use the name Graffiti Hurts, Scott developed and founded what is now Australia’s only national community education not for profit organization; Graffiti Hurts – Australia, early in 2008.

The organizations first public campaign was held in April to help the Return Service League (the RSL) to reduce the amount of graffiti attacks on local war memorials in the run up to Anzac Day (similar to Memorial Day in the US). The campaign was a huge success with no reported graffiti attacks on local war memorials for the first time in 13 years. 

Conference Topic 

Scott will discuss why, what, and how governments, public service utilities and community can develop a community paint brush mural program that gets results, lifts community pride and ownership of their local area and highlight the difference between paint brush murals and ‘street ‘ style mural.

Scott worked in conjunction with the Melbourne Train service company Connex Melbourne in the development of a community mural campaign that has seen a reduction in graffiti in a number of areas.