Repairing resilience with the BCR Toolkit

The Black Summer bushfires were a sobering disaster milestone for thousands of Australians, a catastrophic event that burned more than 24 million hectares, directly claimed 34 lives and destroyed over 3000 buildings. Livestock losses tipped almost 70,000 while the toll on wildlife was estimated to be nudging 3 billion.

The fires left impacted communities reeling as businesses were shut down and crippled by supply chain issues. Thousands of jobs were lost in the nation’s tourism sector alone; it’s estimated the impact of the fires wiped $2.8 billion in tourism revenue from the Australian economy.

In the wake of the fires, Resilient Ready co-designed its Business Community Resilience (BCR) Toolkit with bushfire-impacted communities. The approach proved so popular that we further developed and expanded the approach. Our BCR Toolkit is now helping businesses across Australia impacted by all kinds of disasters, including bushfires, drought, pandemics, and floods.

Resilient Ready Founder Renae Hanvin said that since launching the BCR Toolkit, the feedback has been overwhelming on how it is helping to change how people do business during disaster recovery.

“We launched our pilot program in 2022, working closely with communities across southern and northern NSW,” Renae said. “That pilot was jointly funded by the NSW and Commonwealth Government Bushfire Community Recovery and Resilience Fund (BCRRF) and comprises micro-learning modules released each fortnight to help business owners and operators build resilience.

“Unfortunately, we live in an era of compound disasters, so it’s not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ a crisis will happen. At Resilient Ready, we build resilience and preparedness by supporting businesses and communities with the BCR Toolkit, which offers self-paced peer-to-peer learning.”

A core tenet of the BCR Toolkit is the ‘80/20 rule’, also known as the Pareto principle, which states that 20 per cent of your inputs create 80 per cent of your outputs. Generally, 20 per cent of the effort drives 80 per cent of the results.

“You can prepare your business for 80 per cent of disruptions with 20 per cent of the effort,” Renae said. “If you are taking the time to prepare for one disruption, you might as well prepare for other types of disruption with the same amount of effort.

“For example, if you’re preparing for a business evacuation, 80 per cent of what you need to do is the same regardless of whether the cause of the evacuation is a bushfire or a flood, saving businesses time and money.”

The BCR Toolkit has been successfully rolled out across communities in NSW, Victoria, and South Australia and supports a range of industries, including tourism and agriculture.

Resilient Ready has worked with young farmers in NSW to encourage inter-generational learning and build essential skills to forward plan and prepare for future disasters and unplanned events.

Resilient Ready also collaborated with the Torrens Resilience Initiative to deliver a free program for all South Australian grape and wine business owners, managers, operators and employees.

Get in touch if you’re interested in how the BCR Toolkit can help your community.

Resilient Ready is a social enterprise delivering innovative solutions to enable every organisation to thrive before, during and after disasters. To keep updated on news and current projects, sign up to our newsletter.