To commemorate the anniversary of the 2022 February 28 natural disaster, we at the Lismore App are celebrating the Bloody Legends of Lismore.

We want to look at the people and companies that really stood up in the community's time of need. Those that not only went above and beyond at the time but continue to help the community as the rebuild takes shape. Yesterday, it was Joel Jensen Constructions and today it is Resilient Lismore. Executive Director Elly Bird sat down with the Lismore App to tell their story.

"In 2017, just after the flood, we were known as a community initiative called Lismore Helping Hands. That started as a social media group and then transitioned into a community relief hub that ran out of the Lismore train station, and from that train station, we coordinated spontaneous volunteers."

"We worked with many other excellent people in the community to distribute food, we did wellbeing checks on people in the community and we distributed all sorts of donations. We also provided information about reformal recovery."

"We ran that centre for about three weeks, which at the time felt like forever, and we coordinated about 900 jobs through our task management system that we had at the time."

"From there, we continued to support a number of people for probably about four months before we were able to connect them into other services and we also worked alongside council for the one year on anniversary events where we bought together lots of emergency services and community initiatives for the anniversary event of the 2017 floods."

"Then for the second-year anniversary, we ran a series of community events over a couple of months as well. We were very focused on community disaster literacy and we've always had that focus in our Facebook group. We did an event called River Fest, which was as the 2019/20 bushfires were kicking off. So, it actually wasn't that well attended because there was a lot of bushfire smoke in the air that day and the fires out around Nimbin had started to kick off."

"We did a fair bit of community messaging across the bushfires and we did a bit of backup support for the amazing people out in Nimbin who were responding to their own disaster, coordinating all the food relief and coordinating the volunteers out there.

"We came very close to going okay, we've recovered from 2017 and it's been five years, we can probably ease off a bit on our work just due to the nature of the recovery. And then this event kicked off."

At that time as Lismore Helping Hands was winding down, the Facebook moderators totalled about five people.

"It was mostly about keeping the Facebook group going at that time and whenever there were flood warnings or weather events, we would share that information into the group. That was kind of our focus so making sure that people were aware there were weather systems on the way and so February last year, we were already pretty busy because we had the moderate flooding that was around before December before the big one."

"We had the warning for a 12-metre flood, and it got radically revised upwards around 3am, and so I guess our work just exploded at that point in time."

"We had a similar experience to 2017 where we rapidly recruited a lot of social media moderators. We ran a community moderation chat so all those moderators can talk to each other and we can make sure that we're sharing relevant and timely information. A lot of people in our group were involved in the social media rescue efforts. There were a lot of people asking for help on socials, people responding, doing all that connecting the dots."

"Myself, less so, because for me I knew what was coming. I knew that as soon as the water went down, we were going to have a mammoth recovery effort ahead of us. So, I started to think about and plan for that. We started to look at building websites and organising platforms to try and help channel all of the spontaneous volunteers that were about to pour into our community."

"So, we kind of did that alongside and behind the Koori Mail who were doing incredible on-ground work. We knew that there was a very long tail of recovery ahead of us and so we were kind of planning to still be here, now and to still be here for a number of years to come because we're very focused and committed to the need for an organisation like ours, which is community-based run by people who live here. I'm very connected into community. We know the people that we're helping, and we will still be here after the government recovery programs dissipate."

As we all know too well, the size and scale of February 28 2022 caught everyone by surprise. For Resilient Lismore, it meant a big change in systems and how they processed and managed so much more data.

"Yeah, that's been really challenging. So, when we first launched we used an organising platform called volunteer local. And the reason we did that was because it was about self-organising, essentially, so people could ask for help and then people could find people who were asking for help. It was pretty unwieldy, there was a lot of data and it was really challenging. It took a lot of people to run the back end of that system."

"We also had a call centre going, so at times we had 35 to 40 people on the phones all day calling people in the community, checking if their job had been done. It was clunky, I definitely recognise that some people in the community got frustrated because they were getting lots of calls from us checking if their job had been done. But you know, we were working with an imperfect system."

"We then got some support from some local people that work for a tech company Atlassian, and we also got a lot of support and are still supported by the project management software company Monday.com."

"So, I describe it as we kind of changed horses mid gallop, we had to take all of our data that was within one system and change to using Monday.com. We still use that now. And it's a much more intuitive project management software that helps us to manage our workflow and make sure that we're prioritising jobs according to need, so people can ask us for help through our website and what we do is essentially triage those jobs according to the need of the person."

The Welcome board at Resilient Lismore)

"We will prioritize families with young children who were living on site. We'll make sure that we're making places and spaces safe for children to be in. We'll also prioritize older people who don't have their own networks, who are living back on their properties. We will prioritise people that don't have the financial means to cover jobs for themselves."

"We'll also work with people where, if the work that we do will get that person or that family back into their homes so that they aren't having to incur serious rental costs or drive long distances to come back into Lismore, then we'll prioritise supporting people like that as well."

"In the last 12 months, we crunched the numbers and we estimate that we've done around 3,600 jobs to December last year that's not counting the work we're doing now. We've partnered with all sorts of organisations to help distribute grants and funding into our community."

"Now we are delivering the two rooms project which is about going in and putting up two rooms worth of walls in people's homes. That's donated products. So, we will supply the materials, we will supply the labour and we'll go in and put up two rooms worth of walls."

"We've done 75 homes so far and we have approximately 60 still on the waiting list. I encourage anyone at all to ask us for help and we will do what we can to get to you."

"At the moment we've got some volunteer tradies through the Reece foundation in town we're we have a pilot project essentially, to look at restoring central plumbing for people. So, same again, we've triaged according to need and we're out there at the moment repairing toilets and replacing vanities and showers so that people have decent facilities available for their use."

A community-led organisation in the recovery space needs funding in order for that organisation to keep helping people who would otherwise be in very difficult and unsafe living conditions. Resilient Lismore has had some government grants but it is also funded through the generosity of some local organisations and businesses that allows them to operate at a high level.

"We've been really lucky to have the support of the Lismore Diocese, who are funding us for some of the work that we've got, we're working in partnership with the Winsome, which is really great. So they've got a team of tradies that are working for them and we've also still got some incredible volunteers that come in and work with us, retired chippies and things like that. Joel Jensen Constructions have just recently come on board to start looking at working alongside us so it's exciting, I actually think that our capacity is growing.

"We're still a community organization, we have capacity constraints, but if we can help with repairs that will make living standards just that little bit better or help with a small job that people might be stuck on then that's what we're here to do. People should just ask us, and not be shy, don't be shy about asking."

"At the moment, we've got about eight part-time staff. That's mostly funded through the Department of Community and Justice funding, so DCJ funding. Beyond that, we have a regular volunteer team I would say of probably about 30 people. We have volunteers working on our front desk supporting people, we also have some Southern Cross University social work placement students that work with us, and we have a small team of builders that work alongside us."

What is the long-term vision for Resilient Lismore?

"I think the urgency of recovery will be with us for a couple of years but I think that there is work to be done in Lismore and in the Northern Rivers more broadly which goes to that thing about communities being prepared to recover."

"There has been some work done in that space like community recovery networks hosted by council and so I think our organization has a significant role to play. We've got a lot of experience now about coordinating volunteers, coordinating donations, being on the ground really fast to connect people with recovery."

"So, when you think about this disaster, it took eight months for the recovery support services to be in place. The current recovery support services being run by Social Futures and Uniting, and they're excellent organizations doing a great job, but for that eight months, we were doing that work. We already had people on computers on the desk, helping to do grant applications, helping to provide information, helping people to reset their passwords. We were doing that work. Yes, it was the recovery centre as well but as an organization that was in the flood zone, helping people with that administrative work, I think we had a very significant role to play."

"So, I think the longer term is back to the fact that we need a plan to recover and plan to do that work faster and more efficiently because you know, we might not get a flood that big again for quite some time, but what we do know is that we will get big floods again, that's a given, and so, we need to think about how we do this well as a community."

"We have the structures and the systems in place now where we could rapidly upscale our system. What we do know is that immediately after disasters, people just want to help. So volunteers are looking for ways to participate and we definitely have the architecture that we could expand quickly to scale up the work that we do.

"We're really keen to share how we've done things here with other communities and if there's anything we can do in that space, then we really want to. It's challenging, I met with some people from Eugowra (Western NSW) the other day and they're looking for solutions. So, I've offered them what we can, but we have capacity constraints. I can't send a strike team to Eugowra for instance to help them implement a system like ours so they're kind of just figuring it out."

"And that's the challenge after disasters, communities are so under the gun responding and lacking funding, they're just figuring it out, and so they don't have the resources that they need. And so, unfortunately, communities kind of have to reinvent the wheel. But yeah, longer term, we really do want to be able to share the way we do things."

"I'm incredibly proud of what we've done here, it's phenomenal. There are so many good people everywhere. People that have committed a huge amount of their time over the last twelve months to keep doing this work. And we do make a difference in people's lives every day and that is incredibly rewarding. It's important that people feel like other people in this community care about them. And that we will demonstrate that care by actually coming and giving them practical help and practical support.

"I think Resilient Lismore is great. It's an amazing group of people and anyone that's had anything to do with helping us do our work is an absolute hero. And we always welcome new heroes, so come on down."

You can find Resilient Lismore at 215 Keen Street, next to the Lismore Workers Club.

Resilient Lismore and all its staff and volunteers......Bloody Legends!