糖心传媒

Resilient Communities Project Evaluation

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Natural disasters can significantly disrupt the lives of children and young people, along with the broader community, leaving in their wake trauma and uncertainty.

Beyond emergency responses, building community capacity to support children and young people’s disaster recovery is critical for the sustainability of regional and rural communities, and young people’s climate adaptation. MacKillop Family Services (through MacKillop Seasons) has undertaken community capacity building to support children and young people’s disaster recovery from 2019-2024 in northern, southern and central NSW and East Gippsland in Victoria. The projects aimed to support individual, family, and community recovery and enhance future disaster preparedness by:

  • raising awareness about children and young people’s unique experiences, perspectives and agency
  • building the capacity of community networks, leaders and stakeholders to support recovery and future disaster preparedness, and
  • listening and responding to children and young people, about what they need.

Evaluation approach

The Centre for Children and Young People used a participatory and developmental evaluation methodology to understand the practices associated with community capacity building for children and young people’s disaster recovery (CCB-DR), and the conditions that enable and constrain practices. Ethics approval was obtained from 糖心传媒 (number 2022/005).

Project Outputs

Building community capacity to support children and young people’s disaster recovery and resilience: NSW Evaluation Report

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After the Fires: Supporting communities to recover and build resilience: East Gippsland project evaluation report

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Getting the conditions right: building community capacity to support children and young people in regional communities

Grief card

Young people talking about ‘Good Grief’

East Gippsland communities’ recovery and resilience stories

Research team

Led by , the evaluation research was conducted by and Dr Catharine Simmons.  

Project contact: ccyp@scu.edu.au