Mid North Coast Community Leadership & Resilience Network Scholarship

Our Mid North Coast Joint Organisation of Councils (JO) comprising Bellingen, Kempsey and Port Macquarie has committed to understanding our communities priorities and concerns, through undertaking values based social research revealing issues of importance across our region but also to our individual communities.

For our region this enabled investment by the NSW Government late in 2019 in disaster preparedness and the establishment of a Disaster Preparedness Officer to work across our region. For Bellingen this highlighted amongst the detailed findings, importance of sense of place, concern for our environment and the importance of effective disaster management.

Our community has weathered a range of challenges across recent times around years of drought, fires, floods and now Covid-19. This has seen various groups organisations and agencies involved in responding to the challenges faced by our community and council around recovery preparedness and resilience. Arising from that experience is an understanding of the need to work in a much more focused way around the environmental social and economic impacts our Shire faces now and into the future. Our experience through these processes also reminds us of the wealth of knowledge and experience in our community, the importance of our place, and opportunities to invest in community capacity.

The Community Leadership and Resilience Network project being conducted as a partnership between Charles Sturt University and our JO is a key enabler to responding to what our communities have told us about what is important, enhancing council and community capacity and creating a cohort with expertise in what continues to be imperatives for the ongoing wellbeing of our communities.

If recent events have taught us anything, it is that connectedness to others is a critical issue in building strong communities. If we want our community to be able to withstand, manage and recover from a range of events, be they natural disasters or other, then we need to build the capacity and capability of the community to be able to do so. Offering scholarships in the CSU Community Leadership & Resilience in subjects from the Graduate Certificate is one way that Port Macquarie-Hastings Council can contribute to building the capacity of our community and in encouraging stronger community connections. Participating in this course will lead to the creation of a network of community champions along the Mid North Coast that participating Councils and other agencies will be able to work with as we face the future together.

For the Kempsey resilience is not a word, it is a way of life.  After 19 declared disaster events in 10 years the residents of the Macleay Valley live and breath being prepared, dealing with and recovering from events.  Council is supporting these community scholarships to keep building our local capacity to deal with these events and help to ensure we keep building a better community into the future.