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AN UPDATE: Visit the website www.weatherthestorm.net.au
This is a new 2011 project for the NRWC and is funded by the Office for Women under the National Women’s Alliances Special Policy Project Funding.
Project Summary:
This project will develop a program to work with groups of women in communities at risk of, or recovering from, disaster.
The program will facilitate women’s awareness of potential disaster and support them to prepare. It will aim to connect participants together, to build a group for ongoing support, encouragement and community resilience.
A manual and toolkit will be developed for the program and then trialled. The project will run from July 2011 until June 2012.
Background:
The past decade has seen a relentless unfolding of serious disasters, both in Australia and overseas.
Natural disasters leave no room for shifting responsibility or modern solutions. They call on us to rely on ourselves in the most raw and fundamental way. They leave women and children at the mercy of nature in a world where they have been taught to rely not on themselves, but on governments and emergency services. On Black Saturday, for example, 73 of the 173 deaths were female and 23 were children.
We have also created our own vulnerabilities to prolonged loss of electricity, water, food security and the effects of climate change.
Women have unique needs and vulnerabilities during and after a disaster. They also make a unique and vital contribution to preparation and recovery.
Traditionally much emergency management has focussed on emergency services minimising the impact of the disaster. But in most disasters first responders are ordinary community members. We are learning that there is much that needs be done to prepare households, and communities to manage the point of impact themselves and build resilience in recovery. This project will explore one way of doing this.
Project Outcomes:
The expected outcomes of the project are:
- Groups of women in disaster prone areas will become better informed, prepared, confident, aware and connected, as individuals and as groups, to the risk of disaster. They will be better able to engage with government and emergency service agencies around the issue of disaster preparedness, response and recovery;
- A program manual and toolkit will be developed, tested and refined during the course of the project. It can then be used in other communities, and also as an online resource; and
- A full evaluation report of the delivery of the program will be written, providing insights, learning’s and experiences, of the development and delivery of the program.
Project Details:
The projects will establish a working group to guide the project officer in designing the process and developing the manual for the program. As a trained facilitator, the project officer will trial the program in one at-risk community in VIC and one in QLD. The manual will then be revised in light of the feedback received from participants.
A significant aspect of the process will be to support the participants to become a group that continues working together to encourage and sustain each other in preparing their homes, their families and their communities for a range of disasters
The program will be delivered in settings more accessible to women, avoiding the intimidation women sometimes feel in such male dominated environments such as emergency brigades.
The groups will be connected online for ongoing discussion and support through the National Rural Women’s Network (NRWN).
Once finalised the program will be offered to any community who would like to participate.
Project Rationale:
Providing women with an opportunity to learn about all aspects of disaster risk, how to prepare and how to work through decision options and psychological issues:
- Is empowering
- Enables women to more confidently contribute to family and community decisions
- Means better quality decisions and preparations.
- Reduces women and children’s vulnerability to the effects of disasters; and
- Builds individual and community resilience in recovery.
Project Stakeholders:
The project seeks to involve and inform a wide range of stakeholders throughout all stages of the project.
People working in gender and disaster issues, emergency management and disaster risk reduction, marginalised and at risk groups of women, as well as local government and other agencies in areas at risk of disaster, may all be interested in the development of the project.
A working group will be established to guide the development of the program model, its content, manual and toolkit. Other interested stakeholders can register to receive regular project updates by email.
Visit the website www.weatherthestorm.net.au
To learn more or become involved in this project contact:
Kate Lawrence, NRWC Project Officer
M: 0402 080 445
E: kate@nrwc.com.au
The National Rural Women’s Coalition are a member of the Breast Cancer Foundation board and would like as many rural, regional and remote women possible to join the Breast Cancer Foundation’s latest initiative – Register4. 
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