Resilience Maturity

As a group – and especially as individual organisations – community service organisations are a resilient bunch. We’ve always had to be resilient in the face of natural disasters, climate change, dramatic funding changes, legislative reforms, COVID-19 disruptions, and any other imaginable set of confronting circumstances we’ve managed to weather throughout the years. This remains true regardless of sector, location or size.

The Queensland Reconstruction Authority has recently funded the Community Services Industry Alliance (CSIA) to deliver an Industry specific Disaster Resilience Maturity Assessment Tool and Playbook. This project will leverage the expertise that already exists in our organisations to create tools that will further strengthen our organisational resilience capacity.

CSIA has been working with Industry and Government for several years to support disaster resilience in the Community Services Industry with better business continuity planning, Disability Inclusive Disaster Risk Reduction, and most recently in response to COVID-19. The development of a Community Services Industry Disaster Resilience Maturity Assessment Tool and Playbook is the latest iteration of this crucial work.

The project will run until February 2023 but kicks off with a collection of stories to demonstrate the resilience building expertise and experience that already exists in our Industry. CSIA Project Manager Louise Hughes said that conceptually, the collection of stories was about peer-to-peer expertise sharing. “We learn best from our peers; the people who have similar experiences to our own,” says Louise. “It makes sense that we collect these examples from our own organisations because they already have the expertise we’re looking to find.

“Our experience with previous projects in this space – such as the Business Continuity Planning suite of resources and the Business Maturity Scorecard – is that standard business tools don’t resonate with our Industry nearly as well as co-designed approaches.

“So, we’re working across the Community Services Industry to build a resilience maturity assessment tool and playbook that makes sense to our organisations and their context,” she explains.

CSIA is partnering with six regional Queensland organisations to engage as many other community services organisations as possible from across the State.