How connected to your Community are you?



Individual property visits should never be under valued



How big is your community? How big is the bush fire risk that you are trying to communicate with your one or two community engagement mates? Do you believe that we have to personally deliver messages and information to every person in our community?



While there are many brigades who are integral to their communities and extremely well connected, many others are less connected. So when it comes to dealing with say, five thousand urban-bushland interface properties - the task may appear so daunting that we don't start it at all. Or another scenario is where do we start when there are hundreds of isolated rural properties that take a couple of hours each to visit? 

Discussing the Bush Fire Risk Management Plan



But to achieve the desired outcomes of resilient communities, which may include getting behavioural change from our residents, can we realistically directly deal with every property or resident?



Sure, the Bush Fire Risk Management Plan can direct us to areas at most risk from bush fire, but it is not specifically designed to direct us to individuals at risk. How do we effectively target those individuals who live in high risk bush fire areas? A recent survey we did showed that a very high percent of people living in high risk bush fire areas were not aware of their level of risk.

Tony Jarrett

Tony Jarrett and I were talking the other day about ways of connecting with key people in a community. Tony is the AIDER  Program Coordinator - AIDER provides services to assist aged and disabled people in bush fire prone areas.

Tony was telling me about an approach he uses to target high risk communities. His approach is actually to try and connect with only a few key people, that are chosen because of THEIR networks. Tony believes that by connecting with a few cleverly chosen people he can then actually indirectly reach more AIDER clients.

Tony believes that this approach can be applied in many situations where we can work with small groups or representatives of groups - rather than the whole population.

Rather than trying to find individual clients, Tony looks to use the connection of existing service providers to assist him find the clients and provide client referrals on behalf of the RFS.



Farmborough Heights Brigade -
 involved with their community


Simply put:
If I build a connection with 3 people who are involved in 3 different groups in the community, then these 3 people can assist me to reach their 3 groups. For example it may be the P & C, the local soccer club and the local RSL committee.

Tony looks at the local government population, and the proportions of aged and disabled people within that Local Government Area using Census data typically available on the local Council website. Out of a population of 30,000, there may be say 1,500 people who need some form of support for their core living needs.

But where are those 1,500 people? Nearly every Council has a Community Directory that lists all sorts of government and community organisations that provide services or operate in that area. The Directory will list aged and disability service organisations. There might be 25 such organisations providing services such as meals on wheels, home maintenance, social support, home visits and the like.

In the RFS we love meetings don't we? Well, community organisations are no different. Chances are that in every local council area there is a quarterly forum where representatives of those organisations get together in their service types. E.g. food services, home care groups. So the number to 'connect with' is now down to a manageable dozen or so.

 As Tony said to me - 1 home care nurse might have 30 clients she or he looks after so the challenge is to find where those nurses get together for coffee!

Does this indirect approach to connecting to people at risk diminish the RFS message? Or must we always be the one delivering RFS messages and services?

Are there ways we can build up the skills of people outside the RFS to assist us in building community resilience?

What do you think?

Cheers for now
from Tanyia Tuckey and Tony Jarrett