We strongly believe that local people and local knowledge should be the centre of every project we work on within communities. In fact, part of our social purpose commitment is about embedding capability building and knowledge at the grassroots level within the local community that we serve.
That’s why we always aim to co-design solutions for community resilience with a local working group and to employ local people in our projects.
What are the benefits to working with local people?
We involve a local working group at all phases of every project, starting with the program development.
We find that collaborating with local stakeholders ensures that all of the content we deliver within our projects is highly relevant to that community.
For instance, our current Bushfire Community Recovery and Resilience Fund projects in Blue Mountains, Northern NSW and Southern NSW include people from every local government area in the respective working groups.
What are the benefits of employing local people?
We like to think that the local people we employ within our projects are an extension of the corporate2community collective of experts.
We hire local people for their knowledge as well as training and supporting them to develop their skills and build their capabilities.
While our people live and work all over Australia, we all share the same goal – a commitment to build local and national resilience, with people and communities at its heart.
Our collaborative approach to building local resilience capabilities
We’re fortunate to have always been welcomed into the fold by our local partners, from councils to business chambers, emergency services, industry associations and community leaders.
Our engagement with local stakeholders is never tokenistic. We ask questions, we listen and then we integrate that information and perspective into what we do so that it has direct relevance for that community. Our collaborative approach to delivering every project is the antithesis of the traditional, top-down approach to disaster resilience, which we know doesn’t work as well.
Overlaying our approach with our expertise and knowledge means that any program that we deliver can add a direct benefit to any work that is already being done by council and others within the community.
Finally, our goal is to enhance, support and build resilience within communities so that the next time a community faces a disaster, it is better equipped to prepare, manage and recover from the challenge.
We do disasters differently
We know that people are the foundation of resilience. The more we build capabilities in people the more resilient our communities will become.
Our expertise means that we can help communities and businesses to think and do disasters differently.
To find out more about how we can help your community, contact us at [email protected]
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