Monash University’s pioneering program, Fire to Flourish – a community-led resilience initiative borne out of the 2019/2020 bushfires – has just been announced as the Community Award winner at the 2024 New South Wales State Resilient Australia Awards.
Fire to Flourish CEO Briony Rogers accepted the award, which was presented by Minister for Planning and Public Spaces Paul Scully and Minister for Emergency Services Jihad Dib at Parliament House yesterday.
The Resilient Australia Awards – an Australian Government initiative managed by the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience (AIDR) – celebrate and promote initiatives that build whole of community resilience to disasters and emergencies around Australia as well as capture and share examples of resilience in action.
Fire to Flourish is trialling innovations in community-led resilience with four partner communities who were impacted by the 2019/2020 bushfires: Clarence Valley; Tenterfield and Eurobodalla in New South Wales; and East Gippsland in Victoria. It is generating new knowledge and tools to support local bushfire affected communities by piloting a new model of holistic support for inclusive, community-led action.
Australia is facing increasing disasters with devastating effects on thousands of communities. Since 2019, New South Wales has seen 73 declared natural disasters, with 20,000 homes damaged in 2022 alone.
Fire to Flourish now goes on to become a finalist in the AIDR’s National Resilient Australia Awards, which will be announced at Old Parliament House, Canberra in November.
Professor Briony Rogers is available to provide comments on the importance of advancing community-led disaster recovery and long-term resilience.
Briony Rogers, CEO, Fire to Flourish, Monash Sustainable Development Institute
Contact: +61 448 716 914 or Briony.rogers@monash.edu
- Empowering communities for wellbeing and disaster resilience
- Viewing communities as experts in their own lived experience and in ways to improve and sustain their health and wellbeing at times of crisis
The following quotes can be attributed to Professor Briony Rogers:
“Winning this award is testament to the passion and commitment of our team, the trust and courage of the communities we partner with, and the growing support for our research-backed model for community-led disaster resilience.
“Fire to Flourish is proud to be contributing to the collective movement to build a more resilient Australia, community by community, and this win feels like another step in the right direction. This award is recognition of a model which enables communities themselves to determine their own disaster resilience.”
“The work and lessons of the Fire to Flourish program demonstrate a tangible pathway forward for advancing community-led disaster resilience. This work fills a gap in Australia’s current disaster management sector and we see real opportunity to share this work with other communities across Australia.”
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