RESILIENT LISMORE WELCOMES COMMUNITY FLOOD FUNDING

Community flood recovery organisation

Resilient Lismore has welcomed today’s announcement that the Federal Government has committed to funding community resilience initiatives as part of $150 million in flood mitigation and resilience projects for the Northern Rivers.

Federal Minister for Emergency Management, Senator Murray Watt, announced the $50 million first stage while visiting Lismore this afternoon. The remaining $100 million will be fully allocated within the next six months.

The sixteen Tranche 1 projects are based on CSIRO research and comprise 41 proposals received by CSIRO. They include increasing flood risk knowledge and awareness, improving flood risk management infrastructure, and regional and local economic adaptation projects.

Many of the projects align with recommendations from the NSW Flood Inquiry, and with local floodplain risk mitigation programs. All seven local government areas of the Northern Rivers region – Ballina, Byron, Clarence Valley, Kyogle, Lismore, Richmond Valley and Tweed – will benefit.

Resilient Lismore executive director Elly Bird said the announcement made it clear that mitigation in the Northern Rivers community is complex: engineering solutions will take a lot of time, and more needs to be done to make an immediate impact on the lives of a community devastated by Australia’s worst natural disaster since Cyclone Tracy.

“We welcome the news that the Federal Government has committed to funding community resilience initiatives as part of this announcement, because it’s very clear that communities need to be resourced in order to plan, to respond, and to recover,” she said.

“Our communities need to be supported. There is also a very important opportunity with the Federal Disaster Ready Fund; the current round has significant barriers to community organisations being able to access funding. The Federal Government needs to ensure that the next round of DRF funding is focused on ensuring that communities have the resources they need to prepare for future disasters.

“The soft infrastructure of our civil society needs to be high on the agenda of governments at all levels and one way to do that is to ensure that community organisations and initiatives across the

Northern Rivers are well resourced so we can continue to support each other in our recovery and so that we are ready for the next disaster.”

Community funding vital for immediate impact The Northern Rivers Reconstruction Corporation (NRRC), the NSW Government initiative responsible for leading and coordinating the recovery and reconstruction of housing, essential assets and infrastructure in flood impacted areas across the NSW Northern Rivers, has indicated that it will take up to five years for its programs to be rolled out. Resilient Lismore, as a grassroots, community organisation, has been actively and practically helping Northern Rivers residents since the February 2022 flood. Greater funding would make a real, immediate impact on the lives of those people.

In the last 12 months, Resilient Lismore has delivered more than $3.5 million worth of volunteer aid, including nearly 14,000 volunteer deployments and almost 85,000 volunteer hours. The small, volunteer-powered group has undertaken more than 3,600 clean-up and rebuild jobs and conducted nearly 600 door-to-door wellbeing check-ins. It has facilitated about 2,500 tool loans and helped residents begin to rebuild their homes and lives.

Community members use Resilient Lismore as a resource to help them with housing and accommodation, food support, advice on dealing with government and more. All of this after the organisation began working in a carpark immediately after the 2022 flood, thanks to passionate, dedicated volunteers who care for their community.

Many of these volunteers are deployed in Resilient Lismore’s Two Rooms project, which involves building walls in two rooms so locals can at least get back into their devastated homes. (See https://www. floodhelpnr.com.au/ two-rooms for more.)

The projects is an example of the practical assistance a community organisation such as Resilient Lismore can deliver to make an immediate impact on the lives of a community.

More funding, from both state and federal governments, would increase that impact and make an enormous difference in the lives of people still trying to put the pieces together a year down the track.