Community Development Program

Program purpose

To assist the region to recover after the North and Far North Queensland Monsoon Trough, a Community Recovery Package was made available and funded by the Commonwealth and State Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements under Category C. The package included the Community Development Program.

The purpose of the Community Development Program is to alleviate distress and accelerate the recovery of those communities impacted by the devastating effects of the Monsoon Trough.

Program status

The program concluded in June 2021.

Administering agency

The lead delivery agency was the Department of Communities, engaging with local government as delivery partners to employ nine CDOs working within the following regional centres:

  • Townsville (two)
  • Carpentaria (initially Burdekin and Charters Towers)
  • Cloncurry and Burke
  • Cook, Douglas and Wujal Wujal
  • Flinders
  • McKinlay
  • Richmond
  • Winton

Outcomes achieved:

The Community Development Program funded nine Community Development Officers (CDOs) to:

  • work across communities within the identified local government areas
  • engage with communities to understand the diversity of recovery needs and aspirations of all groups within the affected areas
  • develop community-led recovery and resilience plans for each of the local government areas
  • support and develop collaborative recovery and resilience programs across the affected areas, in particular all programs from within the Community Recovery Fund.

The CDOs were employed over an 18-month period through to June 2021, with an extension provided for two CDOs for an additional 12 months to June 2022.

The CDO’s recorded their time spent on community development activities as:

  • 10,798 hours developing and delivering events
  • 4,715 hours developing resources and tools
  • 1,405 hours on training and learning
  • 8,583 hours in supporting flexible funding grant (FFG) activities
  • 2,155 hours developing Recovery and Resilience (RR) plans.

The CDO’s recorded participation in the community development activities as:

  • 66,175 participants in events
  • 6,625 participants in training activities
  • 4,842 participants in FFG activities
  • 9,614 participants in developing RR plans.

The CDOs also recorded participation from other community agencies in their community development activities as:

  • 7,045 community agencies participating in events.

 

More information

A copy of the full evaluation report is available on the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience (AIDR) website.

(QRA Reference CM DOC/22/73855)