What if disaster recovery funding was invested in the process of relationship building to improve social wellbeing, strengthen community connection, build resilience, and foster community preparedness? — Local council arts program flood recovery funding, 2025

Scenario

In 2025, I was invited to host a community dinner as part of a festival in a small regional town in Australia. Later, I learned that this festival came out of recovery initiatives and funding post flood.

For this dinner, I invited a community participant I had previously worked with from a neighbouring town to cater the event. This meant I could funnel a decent budget towards a local artist/business that had a closer relationship to the context to this region.

In a casual conversation mid-event, an attendee raved about her experience that evening and how much she enjoyed her food. She suggested that there should be monthly pop-up dinners featuring these diverse caterers local to the region given there weren’t many food offerings in the town.

On that Thursday evening, 100 people turned up to dinner in that town hall.

There were a series of community participatory art projects and live music events planned for the rest of the weekend, including a street parade. It rained all weekend. From my understanding, the parade did not continue.

The festival marked the end of the funding initiative.

What If

Disaster recovery funding and initiatives such as these are aimed at improving social wellbeing and strengthening community connection in times of hardship, trauma; and to build resilience so as to foster community preparedness for future disaster occurrence.

We must then invest in process and relationship building!

We assume a 12-18 month project window.

We program 3-6 monthly community dinners — supporting 6-12 community cooks/caterers/restaurants, bringing local audience and community together for low-stakes shared meals and facilitated conversations themed around place and community, social history, environment and climate etc.

Alongside this, a community working group is funded to continue conversations between these dinners to map emergent interests and initiatives — feeding these back to local council to develop and plan. Iterative versions of these can me activated in the later half of the project window, providing prototypes and evidence to further develop these as ongoing programs that council advocate and plan for.

This approach seeks to encourage a few things:

Community cooks/caterers/restaurants generate income and revive interest in their businesses. Ongoing business may occur beyond these events.
Community ownership of future initiatives as these emerged from their conversations over the gatherings.
Council has evidence of participation and impact over the duration of the project window.
Community is strengthened from regular gathering.
Funding is spent across varied outcomes, and are less affected by unforeseen or unplanned cancellations/incompletion of activity.