World Vision Australia CEO Daniel Wordsworth was in Lismore today visiting The Winsome and Lismore Soup Kitchen and one of Australia's largest suppliers of blueberries Mountain Blue Farms.

Mr Wordsworth also has a family connection to Lismore with his brother Ben a teacher at the decimated Richmond River High School in North Lismore.

The connection of World Vision, Mountain Blue and The Winsome is through Ridley and Mieke Bell, the owners of Mountain Blue Farms.

Ridley and Mieke are personal friends with former World Vision CEO Tim Costello. When one of their workers, a former South Sudan refugee, said he would love to build a health centre and school in his very poor village in South Sudan, Mr Costello asked them to accompany him on a trip to Uganda. The South Sudan civil war has seen over a million people displaced crossing the border into northern Uganda and Ridley and Mieke Bell have been funding World Vision's work with the refugees since 2013.

Five cents per punnet of Eureka Blueberries sold in Coles is donated for World Vision community programs in Uganda, including forest regeneration to address climate change.

CEO Daniel Wordsworth has a long career in post-disaster community recovery programs all around the world so it was very interesting to hear what he had to say about how children cope with disasters like what Lismore and parts of the Northern Rivers have been through on top of the dramas of COVID-19.

"In Australia, all of us have had a sustained period of two years of anxiety, meaning am I going to be healthy? Am I going to catch COVID? Are my parents going to catch COVID? And then you add on to that a sort of instability, like the fact that we all thought we were getting vaccines and then Omicrom comes and nothing works. So, it's nothing but uncertainty the whole time. Then you have two years of social patient isolation."

"All of that stuff produces low-level trauma in our community. So, all of us have gone through that and we're completely unaware of the fact that we're different people now than we were two years ago, then you have something like this."

"The difference between children and adults is that adults get traumatized by events. So like the actual flood itself, the impact of the flood and looking at how it affects you. Kids are different, kids respond to how the adults respond."

"As well as the parents, a child is like a spider in a web and the web is all the relationships that the child lives with. So mum, dad, brothers and sisters, aunty and uncle, neighbour, teacher, maybe the pastor, whatever, they live in that web and that's how they develop."

"So, when something like this happens and you lose your school for a length of time and you're not seeing your friends, you're not seeing your teacher, if you're not being able to see your grand parents, it's that exposure that impacts change."

"The key thing is to sort of try to establish all of those working relationships with those kids. That's why you see in big disasters adults walking around with a sort of stunned look on their faces but kids will be playing in the water and having a great old time because they're not experienced with these things. But, you come back three months later and its a different story or six months later. Kids need stability."

When asked about the length of time it will take some families to rebuild their homes to move back into them there is good news for parents.

"As long as you establish all of those relationships, kids will do good. What we do is set up pretend classrooms, we call them child friendly spaces. We tell everybody we are doing education, but its really not, its just an excuse for parents to send their kids to school to create that garden of relationships again in real life."

"Don't separate families and try not to take families out of their communities. Try not to take children away from their friends but remember kids are surprisingly resilient."