Lapsley encourages Anglesea to be resilient

THE head of Emergency Management Victoria (EMV) has told the first public meeting of the Anglesea Community Network (ACN) that a well-connected community is a resilient community.

The organisation’s debut drew a crowd of about 180 people, including state, local and federal representatives.

Emergency Management Commissioner Craig Lapsley said that resilience was fundamental to community and was created by effective and practiced connectedness across a community.

He reflected on a lesson learned from the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Kinglake – as EMV teams looked to support the community on Saturday evening, the dramatic realisation was that the community was not connected and there were no obvious bodies or individuals to lead the town forward. EMV has been spreading its community resilience framework for emergency management across Victoria as a result, and Mr Lapsley said it was a similar yet different situation with the bushfires in Wye River and Separation Creek in 2015 – finding that there was no singular way of communicating with everyone in both towns, EMV and the CFA went to the clubs and service organisations in Wye and Lorne and leveraged their existing networks.

During his remarks, Mr Lapsley said the Anglesea community had two vital questions to consider:

• Firstly, how do we connect the networks that already exist in the town? Not in any hierarchical way, but peer-to-peer between each other and allow important information to be disseminated through those trusted networks and not just as a message from, for example, the CFA
• Secondly, the leaders of the organisations in our community are by definition the community’s trusted leaders – who are they and are they willing to step up and lead in case of emergency? If not, who in those organisations might be?

ACN organisers say the network’s intention is to be a communicator, connector and enabler, providing not only a mechanism for better communication across groups, but also an opportunity for people with an interest, time or expertise to contribute without necessarily needing to become a member of a group.

The ACN meets on the second Wednesday of the month to hear reports and discuss happenings in the town.

A monthly bulletin is produced in the week following the meeting, and is available by email.

For more information, phone Gary Robinson on 0448 117 360.