Commissioner interviewed about community engagement

We are sharing interviews on community engagement with key people in the NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) on the Building Community Resilience blog.


 

Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons AFSM



 This interview is with NSW RFS Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons AFSM.

1. Why does the NSW RFS do community engagement?

The Rural Fire Service is in the business of community engagement because it is a key part of the fire management package.

'You can’t have a well informed and a well serviced community if you don’t engage meaningfully in educating that community."

More importantly we should be engaging them in doing their part to help improve their personal safety, as well as the safety of the community, the RFS and other Emergency Service agencies.

2. Did the Victorian fires change our approach to working with communities? If yes, how?

Nationally we certainly learnt from that tragedy. We came together in a very, very short time period and realised the need for more concise, more simplified, and more consistent language to alert people to their vulnerability and to make sure at risk communities understand they have a key role in managing fire.

It has certainly strengthened our approach in many areas. There have been changes to the way we communicate public information during fire events. We have also started to prepare local community protection plans where we profile local communities and seek to tailor solutions or treatments that will work best for them.

There is no doubt that the Victorian experience has seen us take a more proactive approach to community engagement and initiatives like Neighbourhood Safer Places and Community Protection Plans. We have ‘one stop shop’ information in our customer service centres to assist Districts and community members and we have improved accessibility to online tools. These tools will help people to understand their level of exposure and the sort of things they should be doing to prepare for and better protect themselves from fire.

Before the Victorian fires NSW was doing very well when it came to development control, planning assessments and building in bush fire prone areas. Our integrated fire fighting and state emergency management arrangements made everyone’s responsibilities very clear. The enormity of the Victorian tragedy mandated that we all needed to do more – and we have.


3. How could members encourage their brigades to get involved in community engagement activities?

I see some wonderful community engagement programs at brigade level across NSW and I think we need to continue to market and promote the positive results and the initiatives being done by individual brigades. Increasingly at the Annual General Meeting there are individuals, or a number of individuals, identified and voted in as Community Engagement Coordinators for their areas and it is being recognised as an important role in local brigades.

Depending on your brigade and your classification as a brigade your community engagement activity will vary considerably. What occurs in a village type brigade or a remote rural brigade will obviously be somewhat different because of the population or geography. Leveraging off each other, seeing what other people are doing, seeing what other brigades are doing, accessing some of the community engagement resources and better understanding what sort of things you can do as a brigade is really important.



There are many roles for Brigade members (Penrose Brigade)

 "We are being very deliberate in looking at our flexible membership model. We need to have more recognition of the importance of non traditional fire fighting roles. Having a well informed and a well prepared community is equally important to fire fighting. Recognising the equality, importance and value of community engagement at an organisational level is really important."

4. How can we encourage our members to share their good stories?

We have members across the state that are doing wonderful things everyday but they don’t gloat about them, they don’t put their hands up and say we have a wonderful thing going on, they just do it.

We usually rely on District Managers and other senior people of the District to say, “hey there’s a good thing happening in our area”, simply because a lot of community engagement people aren’t inclined to promote what they do. They may regard it as everyday business whereas someone else may see it as worth talking about. The community engagement forums are effective in sharing and exchanging ideas with other community engagement people, but how much of that goes out to the broader organisation is unknown.

It’s the same for any of our focus areas, for example our aviation people know what’s new and happening in the Aviation business, but I suspect there are many in the organisation that wouldn’t have a clue. We should be targeting this wider audience as well.

We are looking at a new newsletter that will introduce new and wonderful things going on across the State. There will be news snippets and if people want to read more about a particular note, they will be able to click onto a hyperlink and read a more detailed story about what the brigade or member is doing.


5. What is your opinion on people that want to join a brigade and don’t want to qualify for Basic Fire-fighter (BF), but would like to undertake a support role?

"I have been outspoken about this for a long time now and I think it is critical to our future. We need to advertise and promote the Flexible Membership Model, which values and recognises so many other roles in our organisation other than fire fighting."

The classic example I would use is from a Brigade close to home about 5-6 years ago. Every time there was a bad fire weather day, the local brigade was relied upon to send crews up to the top of the fire tower. They kept a visual out for smoke and then radioed reports back as an early detection system. The local Captain there at the time questioned why he was sending crews up the tower on bad fire days when in fact he needed fire fighters on the truck in case a fire started.

The Brigade put a little note in the local community newsletter, asking residents if they would like to play an important role in the RFS. They asked if anyone wanted to volunteer to assist their community and the RFS but didn’t want to get involved with actual fire fighting. They just needed to undertake some basic fire awareness training and not be afraid of heights, do some training in map reading, radios, etc.

The Brigade was inundated with people that wanted to do something different. There were retired members who had stopped fire fighting and people who have always wanted to get involved but were fearful of the fire fighting. They came on board and did their training courses on map reading and how to use a radio, some basic fire knowledge (wind effect on smoke, etc). They became a Tower Brigade and the tower is staffed regularly every time there is a TOBAN or a bad weather day and it all comes without having to compromise the fire fighting workforce.

I am a big supporter for making sure we continue to diversify roles and recognise diversification of roles and functions in this organisation. There is an old adage in the military that says something like “for every person out in the field holding the rifle, there are three to five other people doing really important roles to make sure that soldier is serviced, protected and looked after”. We are no different and we have an army of people that need to come together, whether it’s catering, community engagement, communications, fire protection, mitigation or technologies, and I am a very big supporter of it.


6. Do you think brigades would benefit from having community engagement training in areas such as our key messages and products such as Neighbourhood Safer Places?

I think it’s critically important. It should be done as part of brigade training and brigade familiarisation. Also at certain times of the year we could update everybody on the key messages and send some posters or fact sheets out to the stations to hang on the walls, carry in their pockets, as well as having them all available on MyRFS. Then everyone has a quick reference point.

I remember very vividly one of the skits at a previous Community Engagement Conference at Newcastle where they did role plays. Members in the role play weren’t quite aware of what the messages were and the poor community member was trying to get from fire fighters what the message meant. If our fire fighters don’t have knowledge and make it up, dismiss or belittle the information, then the whole thing is lost and we lose a good opportunity to help make people safer.


7. Are there any groups in the community that are a priority to engage with?

It is obviously a priority to engage with those that live, work or travel in bush fire prone areas, but particularly we need to look at our vulnerable community members. We need to look at what options are available to them and what treatments can be delivered. I think we will benefit from the new work we are doing on Community Protection Plans. They will enable us to take a more detailed look at our communities and work more closely with them. Part of the benefits of delivering Community Protection Plans is working with Brigades and community members to identify their risks and what treatments are available, and what individuals can do on their property or when working as a collective with neighbours.



Workshopping Community Protection Plans at the 2012 ACE&FA Conference

 We have just been through the two wettest successive years on record in NSW. With all that moisture, which is very widespread, we have an abundance of grassland growth the likes of which we have not seen for 30-40 years. In some areas that 30-40 years difference is a generational change and you’re dealing with people that will have very limited experience of fire in their area. For the last 20 years with extraordinary, protracted drought situations the risk has been moderated significantly by the absence of fuel on the ground. We have to take a good look at grassland communities.

8. How do you think a history of doing community engagement with a community helps with other fire fighting and brigade activities?

There is a multi faceted benefit to the local brigade. Firstly the local Brigade can build trust and familiarity with members of the community. There is also a reciprocated awareness for Brigades of knowing who in the community is doing what and how engaged and capable they are. From this they will know how prepared a particular community and individuals or groups therein, actually are.

"I’ve also seen brigade community engagement activities or programs that have inspired the community to join their local brigade, become active in their local brigade or to become good fire fighters in their local brigade. This also brings community members together. Neighbours are introduced to each other, collaborate on different things, and work with the brigade to deliver shared treatment regimes to protect the community, not necessarily just for individuals."

At the end of the day our brigades are a key part of their local community.

9. Is there any message you would like to give to our members passionate about community engagement?

I would like to commend community engagement people and their colleagues in all other streams of the RFS business, who have been at it for a long time. Years ago we started out with community education and engagement at such a rudimentary level, but the transformation in approach, the transformation in techniques, materials and messages has all been quite extraordinary. There is no doubt that when you see well informed, well prepared and well engaged communities impacted by fire matched with a good fire fighting effort you get really good results in that local community.

I think our community engagement members ought to be very proud of the role they play in the RFS and in making a difference in the communities across NSW. Our community engagement conference is so well regarded it is one of the most popular programs attended not just by people from NSW but from colleagues across Australia and beyond. I think that speaks volumes. My simple message would be a big congrats and keep up the good work because there is still a lot to be done.