As many of you already know well the Rockefeller Foundation is the lead agency behind the Global Resilience Partnership and their initiative called the Global Resilience Challenge. In their own words, “essential feature of the Resilience Partnership is a multi-phase resilience design challenge, focused on bringing together people and organizations from across sectors to collaborate on bold and innovative solutions to the toughest resilience challenges in the three focus regions: the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and South and Southeast Asia. Multi-sectoral teams will collectively research and diagnose problems, and develop locally driven, high-impact solutions that can build resilience at scale”.

Our own collaborative (GRC) submitted a proposal which focused on developing and implementing a resilience program which was tailored to community resilience and the specific role of local culture. Partially the program was inspired by our collective experience and knowledge in building resilience in the Australian Aboriginal communities. Suffice to say, the competition was global and more than 500 proposal were in the competition. In the end only 17 were won the opportunity to go to the next phase. In the mix of 17 winners there is also one team from Australia; University of Sydney. While we at Global Resilience Collaborative believe Australia has the expertise to offer more than what is currently being offered we are certainly excited to know that a team from Australia is engaged globally. No doubt, University of Sydney team will do an excellent job with their project called “Disability and Disasters: Empowering People and Building Resilience to Risk”.

We at the Global Resilience Collaborative are very pleased to see that the challenge was very much focused on collaboration.  Collaboration is the key to solving one of the biggest challenges facing societies globally.  This is especially the case when we realise that disruptions to economic and social wellbeing caused by natural disasters are not local issues any more. Global village means collaborative village.

For more details on the challenge and the current teams see the Global Resilience Partnership website.