Harvesting Resilient Futures
Strengthening collaborative leadership across the Southern Grampians and Glenelg Shires to enhance community resilience.
Harvesting Resilient Futures aims to build the resilience to stressors and shocks by establishing networks, building capability and aligning the resilience efforts in the Southern Grampians and Glenelg communities. This Project will result in the community and agencies designing and leading its own strategic path with place based actions that are responsive and flexible. It is envisaged that this will be the catalyst and foundation to a long term strategic approach to improving Community Resilience in the Southern Grampians and Glenelg region.
Over the past twelve months the Southern Grampians Glenelg Community Partnerships team has been working with the community and stakeholders to understand the factors that influence community resilience locally, what a resilient community can look like and how we can work together in a more strategic and targeted approach. Phase one has include a scan of the resilience literature, interviews and focus groups as well as participation in network, forums and research groups. The literature scan highlighted key themes for successful approaches such as: collaborative relationships across sector boundaries, understanding the complexity, mobilising collective action and approaches, community led (with built capacity) and locally led. Local interviews and focus groups have indicated some characteristics of a resilient community such as Community Connectedness and participation, access to resources, services and information, future thinking as well as a focus on social justice and equity.
Equipped with this background knowledge an enthusiastic and diverse group came together over 2 workshops in mid-June to use community based systems dynamics methodology specifically Group Model Building to build a map of their understanding of the factors that influence the resilience of the local community. Participants represented Local Government, health services, emergency services, women’s health and youth advocacy and support services. After creating the systems map together, the group then looked at where they could mobilise action at both agency and collaborative levels. Initial action ideas included a focus on education, advocacy, cultural understanding, network, connections and collaboration and economic security.
The next steps for the project will focus on building the collaborative and strategic network to bring the action ideas to life and to set a strategic approach for the future.
For further information contact;
Jo Brown
Acting Manager Southern Grampians Glenelg Community Partnership