Resilience and community specialist Brett Ellis began working on a resilience-focussed community engagement model shortly after the 2009 Victorian Black Saturday bushfires.
He saw that communities wanted to – and could – dream big and with a little support, plan and implement activities and actions that would make a difference to them.
What the communities he worked with managed to achieve, through an initial supported process that progressed at their own pace, paid big dividends focussed on their own resilience.
Most recently, the engagement model was used to help the Millgrove community to develop a Community Resilience Plan through a project with ResilientCo, AIDR and Minderoo’s Resilient Communities Mission.
Each of the steps within the ResilientCo Six-Step Future Ready Communities Model are designed to unpack community aspirations, unimpeded in the early stages by traditional constrained thinking (for example, financial, legal, political).
At the heart of this work is a commitment to empowering communities, assisting them to influence their own destinies, and ensuring that communities will be better equipped to deal with the most challenging circumstances.
Minderoo’s Resilient Communities Framework, released during the Millgrove project, was used to guide the community’s decisions and actions in the work to build resilience in their community.
The Framework is comprised of two components – the principles and the environments – which are designed to holistically guide practitioners, community leaders, government officials and funders in their work within communities.
These principles and environments anchored the Six-Step Future Ready Communities Model and ensured best practice resilience thinking was applied throughout the Millgrove program.
Essentially, they work in conjunction with each other to guide community on its journey.
This isn’t a blanket approach to resilience building in communities, rather, it is an iterative approach that is considerate of varying circumstances and needs and drivers of community members in building resilience.
Read more about the Framework https://cdn.minderoo.org/content/uploads/2022/05/25130720/FFR-Resilient-Communities-Framework.pdf