Project Summary
The Northern Rivers region of NSW is on the front line of the climate crisis, with compounding
weather-related disasters in recent years including catastrophic floods and landslips in 2022.
The University Centre for Rural Health (UCRH) in Lismore (the epicentre of the 2022 disaster)
includes researchers with positive and abiding connections to community.
Place-based grass-roots community groups were pivotal in emergency and recovery efforts in
the aftermath of the 2022 disaster, often referred to as ‘resilience hubs’ because they set up in
village and town halls. Women especially made significant and enduring local contributions to
the health, wellbeing and recovery of communities1. The need for a ‘regional alliance’ of these
groups was recorded in the 2022-3 Sydney Environment Institute study ‘Self-organising systems
to minimise future disaster risk’2 (The Northern Rivers arm of this project was led by CI
Longman from UCRH) where participants repeatedly called for such an alliance.
The Northern Rivers Community Resilience Alliance3 (NRCRA) was subsequently established in
March 2024 in response to a recognised need for an Alliance and Peer Support Network aimed
at increasing the recognition and collaboration of grassroots community-led disaster groups
and organisations. Government-led platforms such as the Reconstruction Authority-led Health
and Wellbeing Sub-committee and Council-led Community Resilience Networks formerly had
no region-wide connection to grass-roots community based organisations which led to
inefficiencies in connecting individually and gaps in understanding needs across the region.
The proposed project aims to inform, record and share learning about the emergence of the
newly forming (March 2024) Northern Rivers Community Resilience Alliance (NRCRA). The
UCRH has been instrumental in supporting the emergence of the NRCRA, as an active member
of a working party and rapporteur at all meetings and workshops to date. The project hits the
current ‘sweet spot’ at the intersection of academia/research and community – and is a
genuinely ‘community-led, codesigned and codeveloped’ enterprise. The project will provide
the initial evidence base for locally-led resilience alliances, opening avenues for future research
and practice funding where this approach is increasingly being called for.
