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Place-Based and Community-Led Specific Disaster Preparedness and Generalisable Community Resilience

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Place-Based and Community-Led Specific Disaster Preparedness and Generalisable Community Resilience Cross-Sectoral Conversations about Innovations and Struggles, Learnings and Changes in the Aftermath of the February 7 2009 Black Saturday Mega-Firestorm A shared Inquiry among Local Government Authority officers, Community Service Organisation workers and Community Recovery Committee members hosted by CatholicCare Bushfire Community Recovery Service Daryl Taylor and Helen Goodman Citation: Taylor, D. & Goodman, H. Place-Based and Community-Led: Specific Disaster Preparedness and Generalisable Community Resilience. CatholicCare Bushfire Community Recovery Service. Melbourne, 2015. Launch: Friday 20 February 2015 at the City of Whittlesea Preface This report details findings from an interactive research project that sought views from three groups in the recovery period following the 2009 Black Saturday bushfire. These participants were from Local Government, Community Recovery Committees, and Community Service Organisations. The data was collected between June and August 2011, two years after the fires. In March 2014 the final write up was completed CatholicCare (formally CentaCare) was a Bushfire Community Recovery Service, in the Melbourne Archdiocese of the Catholic Church. This service was in part a response to the $4 million collected from the Catholic community in Australia. The Archbishop’s Charitable Appeal Bushfire Fund was established to administer and manage the funds collected. One of the Community Development activities of the Bushfire Community Recovery Service resulted in this report. You may come to this report from any number of perspectives on ‘community recovery’ after major disasters. You may have been a participant in the work described on this report. You may be someone from a vulnerable community or organisation in an area ‘yet to be impacted by disaster’, perhaps wondering what some of the issues and struggles were in the post-Black Saturday environment. You might be in an agency and have responsibilities in various aspects of emergency management. You may be a researcher interested in research approaches, and or emergencies. You may be a program or policy writer in government. You may be a student writing an assignment. Whoever you are, CatholicCare invites your interest, and thanks you. At the same time we warn you that the read may be overwhelming, unsatisfying, messy and partial, particularly if you are looking for easy ‘answers’. We have not been tempted to strip away the ambiguities, the paradoxes, the grey, and the pain, as well as, the resilience and pleasure, expressed through the voices of those who provided their viewpoints. Together these various and at times disparate viewpoints constitute the work of this project. The reader will find there are gaps in the portrayal of issues that one might expect to find discussed in a recovery setting. There were absent voices for example, particularly those from state government roles. We have used some secondary sources of data for some missing perspectives. There were many conversations about the difficulties faced particularly by local government and community recovery committees in implementing the policies and decisions of other levels of government. There were also many glimpses of empathy with the difficulties faced by state government staff acting within a context of intense political and election cycle pressures. In addition, conscious of facing severely affected citizens in disaster-impacted communities, with their expectations for decisive action. Add to this mix an actively engaged media and you get a sense of some of the pressures at play at the state level. Other accounts of these internal state government perspectives and pressures may be hard to come by, but these would certainly help fill some of the more obvious gaps that are apparent among the many legitimate perspectives brought forward in this report. CatholicCare (Melbourne Archdiocese) is no stranger to the complexities encountered when offering a supportive presence to those impacted by the Kilmore-Kinglake mega-firestorm complex that struck Victoria on February 7, 2009. We have much to be proud of, and we are aware of some of the balls we dropped, particularly in the latter period of our recovery work. We have adopted the view of both pride and humility, in supporting the dissemination of this report; that there is something to be gained by in the face of an event of unprecedented scale for which no one was truly prepared. Like many of the participants in this study, we think there is much to gain in airing some of the many dilemmas associated with post-disaster recovery work. This report is not designed to judge actions, behaviors described or experienced, but to make visible some of the underpinning dynamics and tensions that operate in a recovery environment, in this case, in the critical first few years post-disaster. We acknowledge the gap between the conduct of the study and the dissemination of our final report. We seek to be kind to ourselves by saying, ‘better late than never’. We hope you will agree. Some say we are in the midst of a 'paradigm shift' in the thinking about emergencies. We take here the current National Strategy for Disaster Resilience as one point of reference. The Strategy recognises that disaster resilience is a shared responsibility for individuals, households, businesses and communities, as well as for governments. This report suggests that the journey toward shared responsibility will continue to be a thorny and difficult one. One requiring more protracted cross-sectoral negotiation, with shared understanding, shared resourcing and shared empowerment, a pre-requisites for shared responsibility. Such discussions and reflections on the conduct of disaster recovery need to include disaster-impacted people to better inform responses to the question of how best to enable community-led community renewal processes. This report suggests many new opportunities for all stakeholders, (which in community safety is everyone), with a focus on the considerable resources of government to better support and enable local initiatives, local leadership, local decision-making and local responsibility-taking. I acknowledge the commitment made by Daryl Taylor and Helen Goodman, in their efforts over the last many months, to bring this report to the surface. I acknowledge those who participated in the study, for their rich and thoughtful conversations, which form the basis of the report. I also acknowledge the St Kilda Branch of the City of Port Phillip Library, who hosted Helen and Daryl in their ‘Brown Room’ as ‘writers in residence’ for several months, free of charge. I also thank the Archbishop’s Fund for the small stipend made available to acknowledge some of the time spent by Daryl Taylor and Helen Goodman to finalise this report. The views expressed in this report are not necessarily the views of CatholicCare, its CEO, or Board. I hope you will find the report content as illuminating and useful for future disaster preparedness, response, recovery and renewal thinking and action as I have. Janet Cribbes Manager of CatholicCare Bushfire Community Recovery Service, 2009-2012. Acknowledgements We appreciated that participants were willing to share their views with CatholicCare. We acknowledge the candor shown by workshop and interview participants, as well as the empathy they showed for others in different parts of the recovery system, even when those parts were sometimes sources of discomfort to them. We acknowledge the determination held by participants to make sense of their particular situation (and the situation of others) and the wider context within which they were operating. We thank them all for their generous approach and substantial contributions. Table of Contents Glossary of Terms and Concepts ............................................................................ 1 Executive Summary............................................................................................... 3 Section 1: Report Background ............................................................................. 17 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................... 17 Our Context ...................................................................................................................................................... 17 Our Region ........................................................................................................................................................ 20 CatholicCare’s independence .................................................................................................................... 22 Our Project ....................................................................................................................................................... 22 Broad aims ............................................................................................................................................................ 22 The Research Approach .................................................................................................................................. 23 Local Government Authorities (LGAs) ...................................................................................................... 25 Community Service Organisations (CSOs) .............................................................................................
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