Preparedness works!

The number of times I have been asked, (mainly by our communications people), could you give us the stats that show that preparedness works. There’s usually an uneasy shifting of feet, averting of eyes, a bit of mumbling, and the answer “Well its not that easy…..” When I moved into the preparedness space, I made […]

The kids are alright

Last November I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Transforming Vulnerability Conference hosted by the Global Challenges Program at the University of Wollongong to be part of a panel on Children and Disasters. Wollongong is one of my favourite cities, having spent quite a bit of time there during my Uni days. It […]

Let’s have a party!

The Pyrennes region of Western Victoria has unsung beauty. Some time ago, I drove up with some colleagues to Elmhurst, a small town on the highway to talk resilience. Road trips are one of my favourite things in this job, generally because it involves music and good company. This was no exception. Unfortunately, I don’t […]

Psycho- what?

When I talk about psycho-social preparedness, I often see people start to shift a little bit nervously, eyes darting around the room. “You mean psychological preparedness?” Well, no it’s not, it incorporates psychological preparedness, but it is more. So what is it then? It is the term that we have coined to cover the unique […]

if you could take one photo that represented preparedness, what would it be

I’ve got a request. We are in the process of producing new rediplans (due in October 2015). We have been talking through the front cover with our designers. They asked us “if you could take one photo that represented preparedness, what would it be” So, with that in mind, we thought we’d get some help […]

Cool for Cats

It’s a beautiful spring morning here in Melbourne. It’s also the Red Cross Disaster Preparedness Week. This is our third national campaign to promote disaster preparedness amongst Australians. Each year we try to engage with people with different themes, rather than a blunt “You must be prepared message.” Anyone else hated being told to clean […]

Would you like some steak knives with that?

Our thinking in preparedness is extending to approaching awareness in a whole different way to what has been done previously. Generally the approach has been to have someone up the front of a room, telling people what they should do, giving them a booklet and pamphlet, and then going away. Then, later, there is usually […]

All the bits and pieces that make me are gone

I have been grappling with, at glacial like pace, with developing a training presentation on our disaster preparedness program. Simple task. Or should be, given that I’m the architect of the program. However, if feel like I have reached some sort of writers block, a bit like John Turturro in the Coen Brothers Barton Fink. […]

Burning House

There is this cool project that I came across from the US called Burning House. Foster Huntingdon is a photographer, who posed the question, if your house was burning down, what would you take. Before all the Grade A pedants shoot their hands in the air and say, “nothing, sir, you must leave immediately” it […]