What’s the relationship between a craft group and a bushfire?

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Could making friends actually be one of the most significant things we could do to strengthen our resilience?

When we think about the value and importance of friendship in our lives, we might not immediately draw connections to significant disasters like bushfires. We’re probably more likely to think about friendship as a ‘nice-to-have,’ something that gives us people to hang out and chat with, something that gives us fun activities and events shared with others, something that gives us a light-hearted part of our life where we joke, laugh and play together. But thinking in this way, could we be underestimating and undervaluing one of the greatest assets of the human experience?

For 16 years, we’ve been developing Befriend, a non-profit community building organisation that’s helping to nurture and grow more inclusive, connected communities (or, to put it a little more poetically, we’re helping to tend to the soil from which friendships grow). Since our earliest days, our organisation has held a deep understanding and appreciation for the power of friendship in living a good life—It is our friendships that bring meaning and joy, a sense of purpose, improved physical and mental health and longevity, self-worth and personal confidence, feelings of inclusion and belonging—and for our communities, our friendships grow into networks of relationships that increase our sense of safety and security, nurture our care and compassion for one another, and create vibrancy in the shared experiences of community life.

Over time, as we’ve gone deeper into our community building work, we’ve been hearing more and more about how people’s newly formed friendships and relationships are creating value far beyond joyful companionship. We’ve been hearing that these relationships are acting as a vital source of mutual support—people helping each other in daily life through small acts of assistance, sharing information & advice, and providing practical and emotional support through tough times. And this grows beyond the 1:1 level—the social groups that have formed through our community building networks are acting as a context for people to self-organise, rally as a group, and leverage broader support through their extended social networks in the face of personal and community challenges.

These relationships of mutual care and support are vital for all of us, but particularly so for people who experience vulnerabilities associated with age, disability, health, isolation, financial stress, housing insecurity, parenting strain, separation, grief and loss, redundancy, migration, social exclusion, and other circumstances. For many individuals and families, it is the freely-given friendship of others that is the most vital lifeline, offering us safety, shelter and security, practical and emotional support, kind companionship, affirmations of our worth and dignity, and a sense of hope. While vulnerability certainly isn’t evenly distributed, it’s easy to forget that we all experience vulnerability in different ways, shapes and forms, at different times throughout our lives. Ultimately, we all need each other.

Perhaps one of the greatest shared vulnerabilities we all face today is our changing climate. Significant climate-related events like bushfires are increasing in their frequency and severity, locally and globally. There is a growing body of international evidence that demonstrates that our organisation’s perspectives on the importance of community connectedness for resilience is far more than local and anecdotal. World-renowned research by Daniel Aldrich and others is now creating a compelling case for governments and communities to see ‘social capital’ as a vital part of the disaster resilience investment picture. Aldrich’s research in disaster-affected communities across the USA, Japan, India, Thailand, New Zealand and West Africa is showing that the strength of connections within a community is critical for the community’s collective capacity to respond, adapt and recover in the face of significant disasters.

What is often missing from the conversation about disaster resilience is some explicit acknowledgement that humans have directly contributed to the mess we’re in, through the many complex and interwoven choices that we’ve built our society on. Beyond disaster risk mitigation and adaptation to the current/emerging context, we also need to be finding ways to transform our current ways of living, breaking the cycles that are perpetuating and accelerating our current suffering. As Nora Bateson explains, submergence precedes emergence, so how might we tend to our submerging future? These possibilities will depend on our capacity to work together, to trust in one another, listen deeply, acknowledge our part in this mess, shift our perceptions, dream wildly, experiment creatively, act boldly, organise, and reshape life as we know it, together.

Maybe a craft group isn’t the craziest place to begin, after all.

This blog is the first in a series entitled “This is Resilience”, where we explore the themes from our community research focused on resilience and how the connections we build in ordinary times can become lifelines in extraordinary ones.