I love sharing ideas and collaborating with others, that’s why I’m excited to be working with Mary Farrow from Emerald Community House and Vicky Mann from Kinglake Ranges Neighbourhood House. Both centres are doing incredible work to build resilience within their respective communities and now they are working along with Monash Disaster Resilience Initiative (MUDRI) to share stories, compare activities and learn from each other. The development of the “Resilience 101” collaboration is very exciting and will change the way we think about the roles of neighbourhood houses and other community groups.
To give you an overview:
Resilience 101 is a community-led collaboration that has developed between high risk areas in Victoria, experienced in two of the worst disasters in Australian history – Ash Wednesday and Black Saturday.
Resilience 101 will unwrap the lessons learned and identify practical, community-led initiatives in high risk areas to empower and activate their local networks using community development principles.
High risk communities with the help of emergency management agencies can be proactive in building their self-reliance by taking advantage of community connections through existing and sometimes untraditional portals.
Resilience 101 practical workshops in peri-urban and rural regions will share experiences and knowledge with other communities to increase the strength and resilience of their networks. The workshops will present an array of unique ideas and present real life examples about the roles of communities in pre and post disaster.
Resilience 101 can help communities to be more connected, adaptable and self-reliant, primed for accepting and acting on disaster safety messaging and developing a sense of ownership and shared responsibility.
The consequences of a natural or manmade disaster clearly marks the essential need and advantages of a connected, vibrant community before an event or adversity occurs. By embedding local safety information into a broad range of community activities such as festivals, fairs, markets, community dining, childcare programs, community projects or sporting clubs and organisations, communities can exercise their collective strengthen and trust in case they have to face a disaster.
Resilience 101 provides practical tools to strengthen and sustain communities that are geared toward creating an environment in which we wish to belong.
This program will equip communities with the knowledge and skills to support coordinated responses between strong, lateral networks in the community including emergency management.
The results of this program and the associated case studies will be shared as examples of best practice of community engagement with an emergency management context.
Resilience 101 is currently awaiting funding from the Resilient Community Program that is intended to support authentic community led resilience building projects with beneficial public outcomes.
Stay tuned for more information.