Healthy North Coast’s community wellbeing and resilience program
Categories: Action Line 1: Surveillance and monitoring, Action Line 2: Evidence-based policy strategy and capacity building, Climate-smart workforce, Climate-transformative leadership and governance, Health systems wide resilience
Country: Australia
Organizations: Healthy North Coast Primary Health Network
The intervention
Under the Disaster Management Framework, a Disaster Resilience Hub was established to provide health care professionals and community members with access to a suite of resources on readiness, response and recovery. A community driven, strengths-based initiative, the Hub enables communities to connect with health services in the wake of a disaster. The Hub also provides primary care practitioners with integrated tools to assist with disaster medical management education and post-traumatic stress disorder training.
An important program under the Hub is the Community Wellbeing and Resilience program, which recognises the importance of community resilience in improving health and wellbeing following natural disasters. This program directly invests in location-based initiatives, supporting communities in building resilience and fostering social capital.
Through four years of investment, the Healthy North Coast Primary Health Network has noted benefits such as a more connected, skilled and more resilient sector.
Since 2021 the Community Wellbeing and Resilience Program has awarded 26 grants, with a total value of $6.3 million through funding provided by the Australian Government Department of Health and NSW Government Ministry of Health. The program has supported communities across the NSW North Coast following severe weather events including bushfires and floods.
Healthy North Coast’s Community Wellbeing and Resilience program has been recognised for its efforts in building community health and wellbeing resilience in the face of increasing climate disasters, winning the 2024 Resilient Australia Mental Health and Wellbeing Award for NSW.
Success factors
The initiative achieves successful outcomes through accomplishment of key objectives which:
- Nurture partnerships through strong linkages between institutions, organisations, and groups to empower collaborative responses to climate change.
- Leverage local knowledge by integrating community-derived insights and expertise to strengthen adaptive capacity in the face of climate challenges.
- Foster cohesion by cultivating trust, belonging, and social unity to reinforce social capital within communities.
- Support resilience by equipping communities with the knowledge, skills, and resources needed to adapt to climate-related health impacts.
- Lean into connections by prioritizing social relationships and building social capital to enhance community health and wellbeing.-
- Support place based solutions to offer practical, locally tailored approaches to meet the specific health and wellbeing needs of each community.
- Healthy North Coast held interactive sessions with regional community service providers. The sessions generated strong enthusiasm and:
- Shared key learnings and outcomes from the Community Wellbeing and Resilience (CWR) grant program, including priorities for future funding rounds
- Introduced the proposed Participatory Grant-making (PGM) approach for upcoming CWR funding
- Gathered provider feedback on the PGM model
Providers valued the engagement opportunities to workshop ideas collaboratively, finding the format more efficient than traditional tender processes. The approach also fostered greater synergy and cooperation among short-listed organisations.
Recommendations
Implementing a community resilience program using a participatory approach presents several key challenges that must be addressed by organisations considering replication. Time commitment is a notable concern, particularly for smaller organisations. Peer evaluation may introduce bias due to existing relationships and competition, necessitating clear guidelines to ensure fairness. Concerns around confidentiality and intellectual property when sharing proposals can reduce open dialogue and collaboration between providers.
To overcome these challenges, organisations should consider adopting a phased implementation strategy that allows for gradual engagement and capacity building, especially for smaller entities with limited resources. Establishing transparent peer review protocols such as anonymized evaluations and rotating review panels can help mitigate bias and foster trust. Creating secure platforms for proposal sharing, coupled with clear intellectual property agreements may encourage open collaboration while protecting sensitive information.
Key resources
Click here to return to the Belém Health Action Library