Off 2 Parliament House for award ceremony -Canyonleigh Brigade will receive an award for a community engagement program they developed RFS

Why I'm addicted to 'Six Thinking Hats'

I’m a big fan of Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’ - http://www.debonothinkingsystems.com/tools/6hats.htm 

Kurwongbah State School in QLD has shared some good tools and activities that may be handy if you find yourself stuck - http://www.kurwongbss.eq.edu.au/thinking/Hats/hats.htm

This site brings you up to speed on the colours of each ‘hat’, definitions and how you can apply each one. Click on the link to their ‘annotated bibliography’ for lots of great resources.

For me the Six Thinking Hats are handy when:

• brainstorming

• planning an event or activity

• for problem solving

• report writing

• project planning

Once you work through the ‘hats’ you cover a lot of ground.

Who is your audience? Have you anticipated their needs or reactions? Are you missing something? Are there other opportunities you hadn’t thought of? Are you using the right tools or format?

Any other planning or thinking tools that you like?

Nicole

Social Media in the 2011 Victorian Floods Report http://ow.ly/6JdKh found over 320 000 social media mentions . . . . . .

SHAPE COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT in the RFS. Nominate to join the Community Engagement Consultative Sub-committee
http://ow.ly/6IYcp

Greetings from new team member

Hi everyone!  My name is Nicole Miller and I'm a new Community Engagement Coordinator here at HQ in Lidcome.


My LinkedIn profile is http://www.linkedin.com/in/millernicole so you can read a bit about me.


My career includes film and television production, project management, internal and external communications, and community engagement. My previous position was at the University of Western Sydney where I managed a free community legal clinic and legal teaching program.  I grew up in the Hawkesbury Region (Bowen Mt, Kurrajong and Richmond) and was a member of Grose Vale brigade as a teenager.  Cumberland Zone HQ took very little time to sign me up on Open Day (see pic below).  My father, Rick Miller, has been a volunteer for Hawkesbury brigades for as long as I can remember and he is a volunteer fire investigator on the Central Coast.


I look forward to meeting many of you and sharing Community Engagement tips, resources and strategies.

Some interesting reading:

Liverpool City Council's Community Engagement toolkit - http://bit.ly/q2siLU. I like their ‘10 Principles for Community Engagement’. Their planning tool on page 2 initially looks a little scary (lots of coloured cells on a grid) yet it actually is quite a useful tool for breaking down a big program or project into bite sized jobs.


Best wishes,

Nicole

PS - I hope your Open Days were a great success.


Photo caption: Senior Deputy Captain, Ron Freeman, signing up Community Engagement Coordinator, Nicole Miller, at Cumberland Zone HQ Open Day 2011.

Bush Fire Survival Plan - be honest, have you read it?

Hi there,

At the recent Community Engagement forums we have been spending a fair bit of time talking about our products and the tendency to use 'fire fighters jargon'. When you talk about a subject regularly it is easy to forget how difficult it can be for someone with little or no fire experience to understand words that you use all the time. We have had some really good discussions around some of these words and phrases such as:

• bush fire prone land
• ember attack
• APZ
• fuel and fuel load
• asset
• treatments



Have YOU read this document?

 What has really surprised, and yes alarmed and even confounded me, is how very few of our members are familiar with our Bush Fire Survival Plan. I am still coming across groups of members who have not yet seen the new booklet.


How can we communicate with you more effectively about new tools and products? I would love to hear any suggestions on how we can improve communications, especially about new products and community engagement events such as the regional forums and road shows.


For any of us working with the community on bush fire safety, the Bush Fire Survival Plan should be our main resource tool. It is the document we need to know back to front and upside down. The messages in this document are absolutely core to what we do.




Do you know what order you may receive these?

 

How is YOUR knowledge? Do you know how many plans are actually in the Bush Fire Survival Plan? Do you know the importance of triggers when developing a plan? Do you know what PREPARE. ACT. SURVIVE. means?

There has been a lot of change to our products such as the Bush Fire Survival Plan, Neighbourhood Safer Places, Fire Danger Ratings and even the Emergency Survival kit we now recommend. It is a hard task to stay up to date and to use jargon free language when our products can be very complex - but it is a challenge we need to embrace and encourage each other to actively try to master.

What ways can we improve our product knowledge?

• read the Bush Fire Survival Plan - even one page a week
• pick a page in the Bush Fire Survival Plan and discuss it with your family - how do they interpret it, or your brigade - encourage the discussion
• speak to your Fire Control Centre to see what information they have
• have a look at our new fact sheets
• join our community engagement Facebook page RFS NSW Community Engagement facebook page and become part of the conversation and knowledge sharing
• ask questions about the Bush Fire Risk Management plan for your area
• surf our website http://www.rfs.nsw.gov.au/

For me being involved in discussions is a really good way to learn and remember important information. It is also a good way to challenge my own interpretation and understanding of a topic. Even if you are confident that you are up to date with your understanding of our products, I encourage you to engage others in conversations about our bush fire safety messages so that together we can all improve our knowledge.

The power of the conversation should never be underestimated!




Our main message

  

Cheers from

Tanyia

Want to join the NSW RFS Community Engagement team? We have 2 vacant positions http://ow.ly/5ylqa- . A job that can help save lives!

About connecting with communities .. . . . .

When surfing the internet recently on the words 'community engagement', I came across a phrase that said 'effected people should be invited to participate in community engagement processes first'. I started to ponder what this type of statement could actually mean in relation to community engagement in the RFS? How does it translate into our world?

Engaging on level of bush fire risk is core business for the RFS

Is it that we need to focus our engagement on the areas in our community that may be most at risk of a bush fire? Have you looked at the Bush Fire Risk Management Plans (BFRMP) for your area? Has your brigade looked at them? If we were to genuinely seek to make a real difference to the Bush Fire Safety of our communities, then doesn't it make sense to target our community engagement efforts to the areas most at risk of a bush fire?

So if we are working towards making our community engagement activities count then we need to understand what IS community engagement. One definition of community engagement is:

'Community engagement' is a planned process with the specific purpose of working with identified groups of people, whether they are connected by geographic location, special interest, or affiliation or identity to address issues affecting their well-being.

Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment

What appeals to me in this definition are the words planned process (though I am usually not keen on being process driven), working with, identified groups and well being.



Ensuring communities know what to expect when a bush
fire occurs. Photo courtesy Gary Walker

 Is what you are calling community engagement REALLY community engagement?

Is it a planned process that involves working with identified groups?

Are your community engagement activities interactive? Or are they about "telling and directing"?

Are they about the sharing of your goals  for a safer community?

Are they about creating a real, honest connection and two way communication?

What is the difference between public relations, recruitment, community education and community engagement? Is there a difference?


Community engagement takes planning and is not as an afterthought. Engaging is hard work, and won’t get the time and attention it needs if the leaders of organisations and teams, do not stress its importance. Just as importantly the community is smart, and people will quickly recognise when engagement is being given lip service, rather than seen as a priority. When we go through the ‘motion’ of engagement in order to tick a box, or so that we can say ‘it has been done’, then we actually build up a community resistance to future community engagement approaches that may in fact be genuine.

So following are some suggestions for you to consider:

Research
Know the ‘connectors’ in the community that you wish to engage on bush fire safety. Where do people gather, go regularly and what brings people together. Know who are the community leaders, both formally and informally. What are the issues in that community? What has happened when other organisations (councils, developers, utilities, health organisations etc.) have tried to engage the community? What type of community is it? Close knit, disparate, geographically isolated, attached to the history, fast growing – all groups or communities have their own personalities.



Do residents in high risk areas know they live in a
high risk area? Photo courtesy Gary Walker.



Listen.

Engagement is not just promotion- handing out of newsletters and holding a display. If your engagement is all about telling the community what’s important, what you’re doing and what you want them to do then it’s not engaging. We need to actively plan for, and seek, two way communications if we want to increase the level of community action. We need to listen and we need to actively seek to understand their position and attitude.

Join local conversations.
We cannot expect all of the conversation to come to us. People are discussing community news, events in the community, what their neighbour is doing and lots of day to day chatter in physical community locations and with social media tools such as Face Book and community blogs. You need to join those discussions and respect the place of others who are leading the conversations.

Telling and one-way conversations have their place, but real and effective engagement involves more than one voice in the conversation. It involves listening, sharing knowledge, seeking suggestions, encouraging the sharing of stories, asking questions, checking for understanding, sharing learnings and personal experiences. It involves conversations and humility. To engage we need to be thick skinned, tolerant, tactful, resourceful, resilient and approachable. We need to remember how crucial conversations are to learning, changing behaviour and improving the understanding of bush fire risk. Conversations need a friendly voice and often benefit from the ability to have a laugh.



Conversations are critical to community engagement



Community engagement has many different shapes and forms. It can zap all your energy or leave you on a high feeling really positive. In the RFS it is about helping people to understand their level of risk to bush fire so that they can take steps to protect themselves and their families. It is about making real connections that could help to save a life.



We connect. We interact. We exchange knowledge. We listen. We build relationships in our communities to help preserve life and property from bush fire.

Cheers and thanks

Tanyia

WIN TV are here to take some footage of our Community Engagement and Fire Awareness Conference- they will see lots of smiling faces #RFSengagemet

Roadshows Week 4 - The Final Leg



This fighter jet landed at the airport  next to the
Cessnock FCC  – what a sight!

 Last week of the Roadshows!



We left a rainy miserable Sydney and arrived in a bright, sunny and surprisingly crisp Cessnock. The FCC is located next door to the airport and Lew was very excited about the fighter jet that landed during the afternoon – must be a guy thing!

 

The Community Engagement  Manual is a useful tool to

support local activities



 There was a lot of energy in the afternoon session, with Marty talking to the group about  collaborating with other areas and their experience with focusing on certain stakeholders such as real estate agents, mining companies and the defence forces. Brian and Meegan then shared the Community Engagement Resource Folder they’ve developed. This folder is a guide for  community engagement and includes information about forms, programs and resources. Each brigade in the area will be getting a copy of the resource folder.



Leanne’s presentation was by far the most fun, creative and interactive we’ve seen. She has developed an online game show using bush fire related questions. This helps people to review, learn and understand RFS bush fire safety information and key messages in a fun and non threatening manner that really engages. Leanne presented factual information in an entertaining way and everyone had a ball! She shared the technology to create the game - it really is very simple and yes we will pass it on through the forums.



This was a thoroughly enjoyable evening session with much sharing, learning and laughter!

Next stop Hornsby FCC!

Rufus

The Lakes Team Mascot

We arrived at the beautiful Hornsby FCC and set up for the afternoon session. We were joined by some of our other team members Melissa, Terry and Luke as well as Anne Mathieson (who very luckily got to spend the whole week Roadshowing with us!)



We were visited by Smokey

the Gosford Mascot

The afternoon session saw some debate about the growing use of social media as a communication method as well as some interesting viewpoints about utilisation of this Blog - in particular what was written about the first week of the Roadshows. This afternoon session had the most varying views in the room that we came across in the roadshows. It was interesting to see and hear the differences of opinion and levels of understanding.

A huge turnout for the evening session with some good conversation about the survey results that were presented. We appreciated the effort Scott Jones went to in organising the community engagement trailers to be accessible and on display.

Due to the amount of discussion and comment it was a late night home for everyone but the group at Hornsby made the trip thoroughly worthwhile!

The Picton afternoon session was small but very positive. Dennis shared some local knowledge and ideas that had been used in the past to gather information from residents about their properties.


These models take Michael and Gary  up to 10 months to research and

build but are a great talking point!



The evening session grew and grew and grew!  A vocal, enthusiastic group with a very diverse range of presentations. Michael, Gary and Ursula spoke about a presentation they give which involves using a model of the local area to demonstrate fire behaviour and property preparation. Lesley talked about some very interesting games they use to keep children occupied while they talk to parents at shows, fetes and fairs. A presentation from Lesley is guaranteed to have humour, humility and be thoroughly entertaining and this presentation was no exception. Maureen gave the group an update on the Fire Awareness Community Team (FACT) pilot program that is being run in the Southern Highlands. Value was added by her personal insights and belief in the pilot.

Phil's presentation about the

Urban Interface Day

was a hit with the crowd

The highlight for many in the crowd was Phils presentation on the Urban Interface program that is run in the Illawarra. This program targets one street at a time and participating residents have the opportunity to see how fire fighters may fight a fire on or near their property. This program is run as both a training exercise for members as well as an opportunity to engage with the local residents about bush fire safety on their own property.



A really great turn out at Picton

 – lots of energy and enthusiasm!

 We were so impressed with the Urban Interface program that we asked Phil and the Illawarra team to present at the Operational Directorate Staff Forum and the Community Engagement and Fire Awareness Conference to be held in Wollongong at the end of the month. It is an innovative program with many benefits for both the resident and the RFS members that we have not heard happening else where in the State.

The final two roadshows were held at Katoomba. The evening session saw over 50 people in attendance with four presentations.



Mina and Larry (who happened to share his birthday with us)
 presenting on their community program at Katoomba



Larry and Mina presented on their Heads Up For Fire (HUFF) program that they have invested a lot of time and effort into with the local community. HUFF builds on the local community village spirit and has involved the development of HUFF co-ordinators.

We were also lucky enough to have presentations from Brad, Carmel, Sue and David.



To all who attended the roadshows we sincerely thank you. There is some innovative work happening in strong pockets around the state. Lyndle will get back to writing the report after the conference in order to better share the learnings we picked up. Over all the evening sessions were far better attended than the afternoon sessions and the content was much stronger, thought provoking and inspiring.



To those that took the time to share their work an even bigger thank you. You inspired us more than you realise.

Take care and we hope to catch up with many of you at our conference next week.



Cheers from

Lew, Tanyia, Terry, Lyndle (who wrote most of this blog), Mel and Luke