ResilientCo Managing Director Brett Ellis reflects on The Resilience Canopy:
I've been asked a few times what makes The Resilience Canopy different to other community resilience building programs.
There are a lot of great organisations doing great things in community-led community resilience building. Over the years I've seen that and been involved in a broad range of projects myself.
The Resilience Canopy takes years of lessons and experience and pulls together a systems and network approach to supporting community resilience.
The Resilience Canopy works with communities ready to become more resilient to future shocks and stresses. We support and train communities to lead their own resilience journey, and then connect them with partners, resources and tools that can assist in implementing their vision.
We're building an ecosystem around four pillars
🔸 Train
🔸 Activate
🔸 Connect
🔸 Share
that aim to strengthen key community resilience characteristics by increasing connection, respectful interactions, empowerment and wisdom.
The Resilience Canopy has a focus on communities, their wisdom, their skills, building their capability and capacity and supporting them to do the things they know will increase their own resilience and ability to work though shocks and stresses.
We (the team behind The Resilience Canopy) have been talking to a lot of people about the opportunity it represents, and there's a lot of interest. We've got a lot more conversations to go. The program hasn't yet formally launched, we've been building and implementing it with some great outcomes already:
▪️The Resilience Canopy is registered as a not for profit company
▪️We have trained 76 practitioners across three States
▪️We have our first meeting with the Canopy Collective (our trained practitioners), with Josie Gibson on board to help facilitate
▪️Millgrove is our first Canopy Community
▪️We have a new website resiliencecanopy.com.au (which is V1)
▪️2024 dates will be opening soon
▪️We'll have our first newsletter out shortly
▪️We're seeding interest across Australia with local governments and potential partners, with a number having expressed interest in being on board
▪️We are on target to be able to distribute more than $1 million of activation grants to communities over the next two years.
There's a lot of work underway, and as a long term program, a lot of work still to go. We're keen to continue the discussions as the program continues to roll out.
With big thanks to the amazing team in behind The Resilience Canopy.