About — WardellCORE

Wardell’s Community Hub and Recovery Centre

Mission

To improve people’s lives beyond the point of disaster recovery and support the community to create a shared vision for the future.

Scope

WardellCORE is a community-centred recovery and service hub focused on wellbeing and social care aligning with the NSW Recovery Plan. Our vision is to enable our community to deliver its own recovery journey and construct long term solutions that align with the National Principles for Disaster Recovery.

We seek to develop and resource programs in wellness and resilience that will provide a coordinated case managed mental health outreach program and series of trauma-informed community engagement activities. These will improve the community’s health and wellbeing outcomes, provide a platform for peer-to-peer mental health support and upskill the community in mental health first aid.

Partnerships

WardellCORE (Community Organised Resilience Effort) recognises the value in delivering programs with the resources and expertise of existing organisations to enhance our capabilities and increase our impact.

We seek to align with local service providers and support agencies.

We are currently in the process of developing a strategic advisory committee for WardellCORE and will hope to include participation from partnering organisations and individuals to offer professional service support, critical disaster management and community development expertise, support with governance, financial management, program implementation, enterprise development and further advocacy as required.

Project Logic

WardellCORE recognises the recommendations that clearly demonstrate that frameworks for recovery need to have two elements at their core(1) :

Every action must be considered with the community at the centre.
Every community is different

Extensive research and documentation from across the NSW and the National best practice guidelines of disaster recovery indicate that community-led recovery (2) offers a range of advantages and demonstrates that the more communities are empowered to take control of their recovery experience, the more likely they are to achieve better outcomes. (3)

Our project rationale is founded on taking an active role in enhancing social cohesion and connections to develop individual and community resilience to support our community’s ability to respond positively in times of crisis.

There is consistent evidence that anywhere between 5–40 per cent of people involved in an emergency event are at risk of sustaining severe and protracted psychological injury (4) and we believe that with sufficient resources we are best equipped to provide impactful and individualised support that is tailored to the needs and priorities of our community.

By investing in our own recovery operations, we can create valuable peer support networks and effective ecosystems of recovery in partnership with local and regional recovery agencies. This will ensure that the community has stewardship over the sustainable and enduring outcomes that are required for long term resilience, and that the recovery process is place based, supports connection to culture and country and increases the communities’ transformative capacities. (5)