The Newlands community is pleased to launch a two-year pilot to implement a locally designed “Coordinated Community and Disaster Resilience” model. Designed to demonstrate the value of enhanced community connectedness as an essential foundation for resilience. It is also intended to provide a call to action to local and central government to support community-led initiatives such as this.

The first stage of the pilot seeks to recruit 100 volunteers to each lead a neighbourhood group focused on building connections and cohesion. Ultimately, they will begin to implement the disaster resilience model developed, with a view to ensuring the community can look after itself for the first seven days after a disaster, before Government support is in practice fully activated based on insights from previous disasters.

Led by the Newland Resilience Group, the pilot puts into action the strategy they developed, which was informed by the results of annual community surveys since 2019 to map the community’s vulnerabilities and capabilities.

Newlands Resilience Group Leader, Rodney Barber, says the survey insights clearly demonstrated that the first step in improved disaster resilience would be to improve community connectedness.

“We engaged with a wide range of local social, economic, and cultural leaders, including Ngā Hau e Whā o Paparārangi, schools, health centres, and places of worship, and found that there are real economic, environmental, social, and cultural vulnerabilities that need to be addressed.

“It stands to reason that improved connectedness enables more robust disaster resilience, and it is also critical for empowering the community to be able to speak up to influence decision-making, which is the key to driving overall public value long term,” says Mr. Barber.

For example, the Newlands project to improve connectedness as the first step in improved disaster resilience not only offsets what local and central government might have to invest in themselves to support disaster resilience but also generates wider benefits such as reduced pressure on publicly funded mental health services.

“Our modelling indicates forecast savings from reduced demand on publicly funded services of up to $4 million per year for Newlands alone. We’re also documenting refinements to our model to create a scalable model for other communities, requiring less upfront investment from them to take a similar approach, and further magnifying the overall public benefit,” says Mr. Barber.

The first stage of the pilot phase of the Newlands project is being implemented by the community itself (through 2026), but it is hoped that it will attract central and local government investment as the public value benefits are demonstrated (to provide funding for 2027, with the expectation of becoming self-funding in the future).

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