This webinar explained key findings and highlighted the self-assessment tool and the online social network mapping tool that have been developed to help Community Recovery Committees form, plan and identify the help they need.
This was the first in the Natural Hazards Research Australia Hazardous Webinars series to showcase key research progress and findings each month. The July 2023 webinar presented insights from the Natural Hazards Research Australia project, Community-led recovery: evidence, dimensions and supports for Community Recovery Committees.
Date: Tuesday 18 July
Time: 12-1pm AEST
Where: Zoom
Speakers:
- Dr Colin Gallagher, University of Melbourne
- Hannah Morrice, University of Melbourne
- Melanie Bloor, Resilient Uki
- Dr Blythe McLennan, Natural Hazards Research Australia
The Community-led recovery: evidence, dimensions and supports for Community Recovery Committees project has providing guidance and tools to Community Recovery Committees, building on previous work conducted after the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires. The research explored four case studies in four different states across regional, urban, interface and remote communities who had experienced either a flood or bushfire, along with surveying disaster recovery workers.
This research has improved coordination between agencies and groups working in recovery after a disaster, helped Community Recovery Committees understand how they are positioned within their community and assisted agencies to better understand the role, dynamics and challenges facing Community Recovery Committees.
Watch the webinar below to gain key insights on the findings from this research, along with what comes next. You can also download the presentation.
The webinar concluded with an engaging question and answer session – so popular that there were more questions than time allowed. To help address these extra questions, Melanie, Hannah and Colin have provided written answers.
Extended written Q&A
Q: Will the community mapping online tool be shared for others to use in future? You mentioned it was in Beta development?
A from Hannah Morris: Yes, we are hoping to start the next phase of the research which will be focusing on utilisation. This will include developing the tool online so that it can be accessed by others to use in the future. We will simultaneously work with organisations and communities to embed the tool into their practice and piloting this with users, doing a continuous improvement process.
Q: Is the Uki reslience group is working towards being able to activate into a recovery committee after an event?
A from Melanie Bloor: We are a before, during and after group, building social capital as we go. Here in NSW we don’t have official recovery committees as such, not ones that include community anyway.
Q: Melanie, what do you think are the most important attributes for a community to have to develop effective CRCs?
A from Melanie Bloor: Good leadership is the bottom line of bottom up I believe. An ability to inspire civil responsibility, to connect the dots (see Colin’s tool) and to build and maintain a culture of connection and kindness are the first steps. I believe in having a decentralised model of leadership where leadership is fostered at the neighbourhood level. In the end, its always neighbours knowing and helping neighbours that saves lives. Diversity, agility, respect are also helpful markers.
Q: Great presentation and work. Melanie, have there been opportunities to work with government to inform improvements to future planning and resilience building?
A from Melanie Bloor: Government have had a number of reviews and inquiries, the recommendations are usually wonderfully supportive of community and…the proof will be in the pudding as they say.
Q: I am interested in how community led resilience team works in with the community recovery group - is it one in the same CRT will most likely be ongoing, yet a Community Recovery Group may not need to step up until the natural disaster - is it one and the same group that is agile and adjusts depending on what is happening?
A from Hannah Morris: I don’t think there is a clear answer actually. We’ve learnt through this project that each location or community has a different way of considering what they do with regards to community-led recovery. Some are more formalised and might be recognised as a community resilience teams, some incorporate membership from local government councillors etc. Whereas others are ad-hoc and grassroots and decide for themselves what they want to focus on, whether they are even called a community recovery group or something else.
Q: This was an excellent presentation and a really important project to land and now share broadly - so thank you. A question I have is, do you think a recent 'disaster' is required to set these communities up? I recently completed a community-based flood resilience project in Longreach which is a community we know can flood badly (the last significant flood was in 2000), but has been quite a while since this has occurred. Getting active participation in this project was tricky due to this lengthy delay since the last big 'disaster'. Arguably though rather than having these discussions post or during a 'disaster', wouldn't it be more effective to pre-empt the impacts and therefore use this tool well ahead of the 'disaster' to ensure a more effective response and therefore better recovery outcomes?
A from Hannah Morris: Great question, and something we asked each community that we worked with. We didn’t get a clear answer on what people prefer with regard to timing because it varied. It really depends on the people involved and what motivates them to participate, which was context specific. Some noted that just after the disaster was the most compelling time to get involved, whereas others noted that they would have felt too overwhelmed and six months post disaster worked better.
Q: Melanie, how are you dealing with any privacy issues when you are mapping your areas?
A from Melanie Bloor: Any personal details collected by neighbourhood leaders are kept at the neighbourhood level, either on paper, or on a memory stick. Mapping (which is still being developed) identifies the households of neighbourhood or ‘pod’ leaders, UHF radio positions (usually pod leaders), static water supplies, alternative access routes, fire breaks, safer places, flooding levels, landslip spots and such like. People’s names and contact details are not kept on the maps.
A from Colin Gallagher: While this question was addressed to Melanie, I might jump in with respect to the SNAP tool, as this question has come up from time to time. First and foremost, we get informed consent from everyone who uses the tool – we’re not collecting data on any individual who doesn’t participate directly, and we really aim to show the users what data they are providing. Second, users don’t have to provide their own name for the results to be very useful, so it will be optional. Third, the information we’re asking for is mostly about activities you participate in a more-or-less public way, so it’s our hope you won’t find this too intrusive, and choose to participate.
Q: It sounds like there are many pressures from govt/officialdom on CRCs to change to 'fit' what they want them to be (representative, legal entities etc), - is it possible that in the future, these tools (like the mapping) will be used to decide who should/shouldn't get funding?
A from Kate Brady: At the moment there are inconsistent ways that community groups (in whatever form they’re in) are funded around the country. We’re hoping that one of the things this research will encourage is deeper, more informed discussions at a policy end (officialdom) to think about the different dimensions of these groups and the balance of how we make sure they’re supported. One of the things that we want to explore further in our data is how people who work in this space see CRCs. One part of the study was to invite people working in recovery (for government, NGOs etc) to participate in the Q-Sort activity (we had 37 participants in this part of the study). Our preliminary results show that people who are working in this area don’t have a universal/consistent approach to how they see what a CRC is or what they think they should be. We still have to do some more analysis on this data, but this preliminary finding is important because it shows that whether you are a member of a CRC or someone working in the space, there’s no silver bullet to how to approach CRCs. The shorter answer to the question is that we hope that the tools won’t be used to restrict funding to groups, but to encourage a more nuanced understanding of the dimensions of the groups.
A from Colin Gallagher: We really emphasise in our work it is based on the principle that there is no one-size fits all approach to community-led recovery, and that an understanding of local context is key. And that’s a point backed up by a lot of academic research on local planning. But it’s hard to say what government agencies might do. I think it is possible that the general matter of representativeness will become an increasingly important factor in how government agencies deals with local groups, and it seems plausible that that would come with funding implications. However, government officials we’ve spoken to aren’t wholly against working with non-representative groups.
Q: We have an amazing group working especially with apartment blocks, but also with single dwellings in the flood plains of the inner city suburb in the Kurilpa region (resilientkurilpa.com). We have an amazing group but are coming up against barriers for support and assistance for information. How do you get around this and get the information we need for their support?
A from Hannah Morris: As noted above, we are hoping this research helps all actors, those from the community side and those from government/non-for profit or service provision side, to understand the dimensions of CRCs and the multitude of possible different ways they can be formed, structured and governed. Not all groups have to look the same way, and this should not impede one groups' ability to access support and information.