Toolkit cover titled 'Care through Disaster: A Toolkit for Leaders, from the Citizen to the State'. Photo of trees some are green and some are orange as they have been burnt. Logos for Victoria State Government, Women's Health Goulburn North East, Australia ReMADE.

Care and be Cared for through Disaster

By , , , ,

Introduction

Ideas and thinking about how to care and be cared for through disaster. Explore the following recommendations from a toolkit by Australia ReMADE and Womens Health Goulburn North East called Care through Disaster: A Toolkit for Leaders, from the Citizen to the State.

Disaster shocks us out of slumber, but only skillful efforts keeps us awake. – Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The extraordinary communities that arise in disaster, 2009.

Summary

For Australian communities to survive and thrive through the challenges ahead, we need to prioritise care through disaster: including prevention, preparation, response and recovery. While stronger climate action is imperative, we cannot prevent every disaster.

What we can do is shape the context in which disasters occur — in our actions as citizens, through to our community organisations and various levels of government. The recommendations in this report layer up accordingly, with each section building on the last. Our goal: to ensure people are better Seen, Safe and Supported through disaster; and in the process, build the kinds of communities we want to live in permanently.

Applying a Care lens to disaster helps us to take a more collective, long-term approach, from preparation through recovery. It expands our view of what ‘disaster infrastructure’ looks like, to include the enabling infrastructure of community connection and cohesion.

It compels us to prioritise the time, space and resources required for community building and community re-building. It compels us to further our expertise in listening, in offering trauma-informed mental health support, and in structurally supporting the community to be heard at every phase in their disaster experience.

From preparation through recovery, a Care lens shifts our focus to more relational, less transactional models of education and engagement. It requires us to find innovative ways to better insulate individuals from the impacts — financial and otherwise — of the growing systemic disaster risk. It requires us to harness the power of government and the public sector to drive the public good; building the community’s capacity to help one another rise to our biggest challenges.

Background

In 2023, Australia reMADE partnered with Women’s Health Goulburn North East (WHGNE) to ask communities across the Goulburn Valley and northeast Victoria what it meant to them to care and be cared for through disaster, and what support they needed to do this.

We presented the findings of this qualitative research in our report, Care through Disaster: a new lens on what’s needed to survive and thrive in tumultuous times. We found that for people to care and be cared for through disaster, three core needs must be met:

  • People need to be SEEN (in their communities and by government authorities, within communities that are
    strong and connected).
  • People need to be SAFE (through disaster prevention and mitigation, access to safe places and accurate, timely, accessible information).
  • People need to be SUPPORTED (equipped to support each other before, during and after disaster).

Crucially, we found that we need a collective response, from the local to the national, to enable Care through Disaster. We offer this as a toolkit of recommendations for putting Care through Disaster into action at different levels.

What you can do as a Citizen

Here are some key ways for citizens to Care and be Cared for through Disaster.

Recommendation 1: Get Personally Prepared

Sources like Australian Red Cross, ABC Emergency online and your local emergency services groups can help you find out how to prepare your home, how to actively shelter in place, when to evacuate, where to go and what supplies to have handy. You can also speak with knowledgeable neighbours and see what your local council has to offer.

It’s scary to think about this stuff, but research is clear that having a plan makes all the difference.

Recommendation 2: Build Relationships and Capacity

Get together with others to learn, play, ask for help, give back and advocate for change — on the interests and topics most relevant and dear to your heart. Skills could be knitting, first aid or how to wield a chainsaw.

Shared interests could be music, art, yoga or rugby. Causes could be championing climate action, building a community garden, mentoring local youth or ensuring everyone in your community has enough to eat.

Come together to do things that are meaningful to you and spark joy, come together to face the challenges that are too big for any of us to address alone, and watch the care flow.

Recommendation 3: Build and Maintain Ways of Keeping in Touch

Start WhatsApp groups, telephone trees and regular social events (street parties or wine and cheese nights are popular) to share information about what you’ll do in the event of an emergency; getting to know your neighbours better and finding new ways to enjoy where you live in the process.

What you can do as a Community Organisation

We know that many organisations are shifting from seeing themselves primarily as the doer of deeds, broadcaster of information and keeper of answers, to more enablers and facilitators of actions and answers that are led by, or grounded in, the community – offering structure, expertise and support as required.

Recommendation 1: Do Education by Conversation, not just Broadcast

People need information on how to prepare and they need it in a form that leads to action. In a world of busyness and information overload, even when the information is out there, people will report not knowing the details of how to prepare.

Fortunately, real life conversations still work. So rather than merely broadcasting generic information at people in a town hall, online ad or via a pamphlet, make it a real-life, ultra place-based conversation. Get hyper local. Sit with people in an actual circle. Invite them to share their own emergency plan, and show them yours.

Ask people specifically what they already know and what they have questions about. Move beyond general statements from officials, and make room for real one-on-one conversations where fears and concerns can be aired, strengths canvased, and very specific information relevant to that locality shared.

Make it joyful where possible: a good chat over a sausage sizzle, knitting circle or community fair. Get the local fire truck to visit every street, delight the kids and have a yarn. Thinking about disaster provokes anxiety, so we need gentle encouragement in the form of social connection, fun and community to face these fears. In this way, the process itself becomes part of the solution, helping people to ultimately be better Seen, Safe and Supported.

Recommendation 2: Learn How to Listen

When you come into a community, the temptation is to ‘do and direct’. The challenge is learning how to also listen and understand. Locals want to feel seen for their needs as well as for their expertise, and we heard from those who’ve come through disaster that not enough is being done right now to listen to, and learn from, community.

But it also could be quite extractive to suddenly have ten different service providers coming to the same key community members wanting information after a flood, so we need to be thoughtful and deliberate about this.

Work to get to know the community in a variety of ways. Information around how a community functions, where its main gathering spots are, the key languages spoken, key networks, who might be experiencing homelessness or at risk of gender-based violence, main tourism locations where people are likely to be in from out of town: these are all invaluable in helping people to be Seen, Safe and Supported through disaster, but it takes time, attention and intention to prioritise them.

Recommendation 3: Accept that this all takes Time and that Time needs Resourcing

When it comes to the moment of disaster, we need things to be efficient. People need to quickly and safely evacuate, hazards need to be swiftly cleared, threats neutralised, repairs managed and order restored.

The paradox is that the deep, slow work of relational organising and information sharing — the often slow and hard-to-measure work of care, connection and community capacity-building — is precisely what enables things to function more smoothly, quickly, safely and efficiently in those peak times of crisis. We move at the speed of trust.

Make and defend the time required for more relational ways of engaging, in all their complexity. This likely means longer-term timelines for project funding and not expecting instant, easy-to-measure outcomes.

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