Developing 'emergency ready communities': A tale of two Victoria councils

This paper describes the approach, findings and lessons learned from a collaborative resilience project between Melton City Council and Wyndham City Council in Victoria, Australia. The project sought to educate community leaders about disaster resilience through participation in an "Emergency Ready Communities" forum. Members participated in a workshop to assess the resilience of their communities using the Torrens Resilience Institute Community Disaster Resilience Scorecard.

The Scorecard exercise highlighted key areas for future improvement:

• Firstly, it is important to have a diverse cross-section representation of community members to encourage discussion and improve the accuracy of responses.
• Secondly, the role of the facilitator is critical. Although there is no one-size-fits-all approach, a few aspects of successful facilitation stood out as important.
• Finally, if completing the Scorecard in a single workshop, preparation to ensure that participants are equipped with the relevant information is important.

Australian Journal of Emergency Management, Volume 31, Number 3, pages 27-32, July 2016. This document is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical 4.0 International licence.