Stories are the Toolkit: Community-led Disaster Response, Recovery and Adaptation

Abstract

‘Stories are the Toolkit’ is a vignette series that illuminates the actions taken by communities as they faced recent disaster events. The stories are based on interviews with 68 individuals who, in their different ways, contributed to community-led response, recovery and adaptation across three regions in New South Wales: the Northern Rivers, the Hawkesbury and the Blue Mountains. The stories themselves are amalgamations. They blend and combine what people shared to highlight what is common among them all – despite the immense diversity of actions, experiences, places, people and backgrounds. The stories are not a comprehensive account of what communities did during and after the bushfires or floods. Rather, the stories included focus on what seems less visible and recognised when we think of community-led disaster response, recovery and adaptation. These vignettes highlight how different contributions can be made through various skillsets, in many ways enabling more visible actions like boat rescues to be taken.

Each story demonstrates how communities often drew upon so-called ‘everyday’ social networks to coordinate support and to access skills, resources and local knowledges. In this sense, what is ‘ordinary’ is powerful and has made a profound difference for many people. The stories also highlight some of the difficulties people faced as well as how they worked around these difficulties. Having to ‘learn as you go’ was routinely cited as a key challenge. Many of those we interviewed said they now ‘feel like pros’, having had to put into practice their organising multiple times over. Others expressed a strong desire to learn from each other to improve how they respond to future challenges. This vignette series sustains and passes on such knowledge for other communities to inspire and reduce future disaster risk through shared experiences.