Climate disasters, including floods, have significant impacts on the mental health of rural communities in Australia. The Northern Rivers region of NSW is on the frontline of these impacts, having been exposed to compounding climate disasters in recent years, including catastrophic flooding in 2022. Such events impact mental health services and place enormous strain on the health system, with workforces undermined by reduced housing stock, staff personally impacted and extensive damage to health facilities. Previous research by the University Centre for Rural Health demonstrated that grass roots, place-based community groups play a significant role in providing supplementary support to the health and wellbeing of communities in large scale disaster events. Building on this, there is a need to understand more specifically how community groups contribute to mental health and wellbeing in post-disaster contexts and how health services can best leverage the capacities of these groups. Since 2022 the Northern Rivers region has been home to several interventions which aim to connect community groups and health services to support mental health and wellbeing including the establishment of the Lismore Wellbeing Collective, the Reconstruction Authority’s Health and Wellbeing sub-committee, Council-led Community Resilience Networks and the creation of the Northern Rivers Community Resilience Alliance. This project sets out to learn from the innovation of these governance arrangements and the contributions of community groups within them as case studies for other regions in NSW, Australia and beyond. The project is funded by a Peregrine Centre Rural Mental Health Partnership grant.
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