RECOGNISING RESILIENCE

The 2022 Resilient Australia Awards National Ceremony was hosted in Hobart on 6 December 2022. This annual event celebrates resilience activities, with nominations submitted from each state and territory. The national winners are selected by the Resilient Australia Awards judging panel.

The Resilient Australia Awards is a nationwide program that celebrates, shares, and promotes initiatives that build and foster community resilience in the face of disasters and emergencies. Since 2000, the awards have showcased innovation and exemplary practice across Australia, celebrating achievements that might otherwise go unseen, and inspiring others to build greater disaster resilience within their own communities.

At the National Ceremony, sponsored by Suncorp, Resilient Australia Awards were presented in six categories: the National Award, the Community Award, the Schools Award, the Local Government Award, the Mental Health and Wellbeing Award, and the Photography Award. The winners of each category are detailed below.

Multi Agency Community Resilience Films Project, Northern Territory Emergency Service

The Multi Agency Community Resilience Films Project developed films in local languages for remote NT communities, empowering them to build community resilience in areas of high risk of natural disasters. The aim of the films was to educate Aboriginal people on a number of important topics, including health, first aid, and coping with the imminent dangers of cyclones, floods, and bushfires.

Films were created for five communities: Wugularr (Beswick), Kintore, Groote Eylandt, Wurrumiyanga, and Pirlangimpi. They were narrated in the relevant Aboriginal language with English subtitles, and the topics and solutions were appropriate to the issues occurring within the community.

They were developed by the Northern Territory Emergency Service (NTES) and funded through the National Disaster Resilience Program, with project team stakeholders including the Australian Red Cross, St Johns Australia, and the Bureau of Meteorology.

Community Based Bushfire Management—a place-based approach to reducing bushfire risk in Victoria, Safer Together

This flagship project within the Victorian Government’s Safer Together program takes a place-based, community development approach to working with the community, unlike traditional community engagement projects.

Community Based Bushfire Management (CBBM) is facilitated by a team of ten facilitators, who each work with up to three communities that remain in the program for an extended period of time—often many years.

This long-term approach means there is ample opportunity for stakeholders to develop trust and respect, leading to more meaningful conversations and more mutually acceptable approaches to risk reduction. CBBM allows any decisions made, or actions taken, to be truly community-based. This approach is not only highly effective, but also greatly appreciated by all stakeholders.

Multicultural Resilience Program, Victorian Council of Social Services (VCOSS) and Ethnic Communities’ Council of Victoria (ECCV)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people often said, ‘We’re all in the same boat’. But this isn’t true. While we were all in the same storm, different people were in very different boats.

During pandemics and natural disasters, research shows that migrant and refugee communities are disproportionately affected, due to unfamiliarity with local hazards and language barriers. A lack of inclusive approaches by the emergency management sector is another key contributor.

The VCOSS-ECCV Multicultural Resilience Program brought together community and emergency management leaders to learn from one another. It helped to strengthen community resilience and reduced the disruptive impacts of COVID-19 in multicultural communities. It also increased mutual understanding and trust between communities and emergency management organisations, delivering greater cultural safety for all who work in and with them.

Above: Tailored community videos in language are supporting disaster resilience in remote Aboriginal communities in the NT.

Left: A new approach to community development and risk management in Victoria ensures that residents’ voices are heard at the decisionmaking table.

Cairns in Your Hands, Tropical North Learning Academy Smithfield State High School

The Cairns region is a beautiful, tropical area. However, it is extremely vulnerable to natural hazards and the increasing effects of sea level rise and climate change. It is essential that the region plan to ensure the resilience, sustainability, and safety of Cairns and its citizens and to provide its youth with the creativity and critical thinking and collaboration skills to solve their city’s future problems.

‘Cairns in Your Hands’ gathers gifted, talented, and passionate students from different schools over four days to develop real-world, authentic solutions to the greatest threats Cairns faces. The project empowered the youth of Cairns through geographical inquiry and 21st-century thinking skills to develop a coastal hazards adaptation plan to protect the future of their city.

AdaptNow!—Changing for Climate Change, AdaptWest (on behalf of the cities of West Torrens, Charles Sturt, and Port Adelaide Enfield)

In isolation, events like extreme heat, power outages, smoke impact, and localised flooding can be challenging. When they occur in rapid succession or as cascading, compounding emergencies, leaving little or no time to recover between, they can be disastrous. Faced with challenges like these, what would you do? What would your community do? These are the questions that the AdaptNow! Changing for Climate Change team, through a co-design process, explored in an effort to understand how diverse communities would respond. From this, the team developed resources with community representatives, key agencies, and businesses, documenting the process with a local filmmaker through interviews and storytelling.

The resources highlight messages of hope, connection and capacity building, but shining through is the message ‘know your neighbour’. Strong and resilient communities support each other—and close neighbours will be the first ones to help in a time of crisis.

As a regional community with limited services, Bellingen Shire Council had to coordinate efforts to support its community through the COVID-19 pandemic. It brought together a ‘local and vocal’ group of community and service providers to respond to the crisis, focusing on clinical support, community preparedness and resilience, information, and business support.

The Pandemic Response Group came together in early March 2020 and comprised community groups, community members, chambers of commerce, clinicians, and service providers. It successfully advocated for a COVID-19 testing clinic in Bellingen and implemented initiatives for communications and to support vulnerable people.

When the Delta wave hit and vaccinations were rolling out, the Pandemic Response Group was stood up again to manage a holistic communitywide approach, supporting communityled activities and connecting people with services to help carry the region through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Helping the helpers support others: Building local capabilities after the Victorian Black Summer bushfires, Phoenix Australia—Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health

Phoenix Australia’s Victorian Bushfire Recovery Project has equipped frontline workers, health professionals, and community leaders to help people recover from the Black Summer bushfires, promote resilience, and support the wellbeing of their teams and organisations.

After consultation, Phoenix Australia tailored and delivered a suite of online and in-person training and mentoring programs that aligned with evidencebased approaches for providing support after disaster. This approach allowed it to upskill members of the community to provide the right support at the right time to match individual needs.

As a result of the project, over 1,800 participants have accessed free, expert-led, highly rated and leading practice training, through one of the 56 workshops or online courses.

Cracked but never broken, Rose-Anne Emmerton

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but what you don’t see in this picture is that the volunteer pictured has recently attended a fatality and has answered their pager to help out on another call. Emergency services volunteers answer their pagers time and time again. They are the definition of resilience—they adapt, they overcome, and they are there. as 30 to 40%

Rose-Anne is the Unit Manager of the Central Coast SES in Tasmania, which responds mostly to road crashes. She started taking photos while on call to showcase the work of volunteers and the roles they perform. She captured this image of her colleague Brodie Emmerson tarping and repairing a roof following storm damage. Just before this job, they had attended a road crash fatality. The photo’s title, ‘Cracked but never broken’, reflects the spirit of SES volunteers continuing to serve their communities despite the hardship they experience while on call.

The Resilient Australia Awards is an annual program offered through the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience. The awards are sponsored by the Australian Government in partnership with the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience and the states and territories.

Learn more about each of the Resilient Australia Award winners on AIDR’s YouTube channel: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=kwOuz7W8jpE &list=PLkMUTT4zhjVo2Pnx38jiUTNhV i13djaF1.

Find out more about the Resilient Australia Awards at www.aidr.org.au/raa.

Below: ‘Cracked but never broken’ captures the commitment of SES volunteers in the face of hard work and sometimes heartbreak.