Mentor or be mentored, that is the question
Our Community Resilience Mentoring (CRM) project for the Northern Rivers was funded by Healthy North Coast (HNC) through the North Coast PHN Program.
Our goal was to build on our Community Carers and Responders program to further increase the capacity of residents in Ballina, Byron, Kyogle, Lismore, Richmond Valley and Tweed Shires by offering and facilitating mentoring to get their community resilience-building projects off the ground!
Jean Renouf, CEO of Plan C, said that “The project has been designed in recognition of the fact that many residents of the Northern Rivers wish to contribute to the increased resilience of their community to future disasters, but aren’t knowledgeable, confident, equipped or connected enough to do so.”
We understood that sometimes a little extra support from just the right person is all that's needed to make a project successful! We partnered with Sourdough Business Pathways (SBP) to use their proven mentoring methodology and tools which enabled us to directly mentor community members, who had high-impact projects, on community resilience-building.
We also facilitated the mentoring of community members on resilience-building skills by other community members. There are so many skills, experience and qualifications that already exist in our community and this was an excellent opportunity to share these skills and build more caring and more resilient communities.
In addition, we offered mentoring opportunities to local organisations to build their resilience, enabling them to be ready to do what they do best when the next disaster arises.
Community members and organisations received personalised, on-going, in-depth support, addressing intersecting aspects of community resilience-building.
We also organised community resilience-building events with resilience experts as guest speakers, to increase the knowledge of the community members and the public.
Jean Renouf said the mentoring, events and knowledge sharing “contribute to bringing closer together residents from across the Northern Rivers, and build trust and social support.”