Community profiling and understanding vulnerability

Communities are unique and each community has different capacities, risks, resources, and networks. The need for baseline information, data gathering, and ‘profiling’ of a community is a critical step prior to any actions or plans being made.

As indicated previously in the section about phases of engagement, community profiling occurs at the beginning and is a research technique that draws together primary and secondary data specific to the community. It provides baseline information and insight into a community’s knowledge, structure, resources, and issues with an understanding of the accuracy of local risk knowledge and perceptions about those risks.

Community profiles provide information and insight on how a community is constructed, the infrastructure available, past emergency history, social and economic characteristics, and how active and socially oriented the community is. Profiling helps us to understand the community so we can tailor approaches to meet the needs of the community.

A community profile will provide you with the level of interest community members may have in being actively involved in your project and their preferred method of engagement. You can understand your community better through a Community Profile Exercise (CPE). A CPE provides background data that helps you understand the foundational pieces of information about a community. The CPE will provide the following information:

• What hazards are the community most susceptible to, and what are attitudes to these hazards?
• The community’s demographic features
• The relationships that already exist
• What institutions and volunteer organisations and activities are already part of the community fabric for instance show society, mothers’ groups, schools, community support networks?
• Where are the community leaders already working and who are they? These are community leaders, not necessarily people in power such as councillors and politicians?
• Where are the tensions within the community?
• What are the key relationships, positive and negative, that you need to be mindful of?
• How do the agencies already work together and what potential is there for closer co-operation?
• What work have emergency agencies already undertaken in this community and how well did that go?

This information will allow you to further segment the community, and then use this information to plot your community’s needs in the engagement plan in terms of methods and timing.

Source: Community Engagement Techniques Toolkit

Available community profiling resources for your engagement planning includes:

• Australian Bureau of Statistics Quick Stats
• Agency emergency management and response plans
• Council staff and local community group information
• LISTMAP
• Local volunteers of emergency services and service groups
• Local school’s parent and teacher groups
• Church groups
• Cultural groups such Aboriginal corporations and migrant resource groups
• Local businesses, including the local post office, and
• Carer services/agencies.

Local councils directly support their communities through a variety of measures, collaborations with government and non-government community-based organisations and may assist by being a conduit into local communities, particularly in rural and remote areas.

Understanding vulnerability

What is vulnerability? Hazards do not impact everyone equally. Some people and communities are more vulnerable to hazard impacts than others. People can be vulnerable if:

• they don’t understand the local hazards or the impacts they can have
• they have no access to information about how to protect themselves or their property and
• they don’t have the resources they need to take action to protect themselves and their property.

Source: Disaster Resilience Education Tasmania

We all can be vulnerable at times, when we map what those vulnerabilities are and understand the target population, we can tailor our messaging and community engagement to influence a change in behaviour.

For emergency planning, identifying vulnerable people within the Tasmanian community has been recognised in the Tasmanian Disaster Resilience Strategy 2020-2025. It is suggested that Tasmanian community demographic factors and geographic location impact on individual and collective vulnerabilities. These factors include:

• an aging population
• literacy levels
• educational attainment
• social engagement or isolation
• employment levels
• awareness level of risks
• difficulty accessing information
• ownership of large and multiple animals
• access to health, transport and other services and
• other specific needs, for example language, mobility and/or co-morbid health limitations.

Vulnerability can vary depending on the presence and interplay of personal and systemic factors. Inclusive approaches to community engagement for disaster resilience help to address systemic vulnerabilities. Vulnerability to disasters arises from variations in:

• geographic location and hazard exposure
  • ability to access and pay for goods and services
  • personal and social relationships
  • connections to culture, history and the environment
  • willingness and ability to participate in social or political processes
  • community cohesion and connections
  • physical, emotional and mental health
  • provision and distribution of government and
  • business services
  • peoples access to information and services, including online resources
  • understanding and awareness of vulnerabilities.

Source: Community Engagement for Disaster Resilience Handbook

When we partner with government, councils and community organisations to identify a particular target audience, we can facilitate better delivery and awareness of emergency management and hazard awareness programs.

Disability inclusive disaster risk reduction

Disability inclusive disaster risk reduction means making sure the needs and voices of people with disability are included in how governments and emergency service agencies plan for and manage disaster risk.

Person-centred emergency planning (P-CEP) is a person-centred method of disaster planning co-designed by vulnerable communities in conjunction with researchers from the University of Sydney for vulnerable communities such as people with disabilities, the elderly, people with chronic health conditions and people living with mental health conditions.

P-CEP process guides people who require support in their everyday lives identify their strengths and where they would need support during an emergency and develop a plan with their circle of support (family/ service providers/etc.). The planning conversation results in self-assessment and actions to increase personal emergency preparedness.

People with a disability manage every day in environments that are often inaccessible. They develop their own strategies for using their strengths and managing their support needs in ways that work for them. They regularly adapt to changing situations. These are strengths that people with disability bring to emergency preparedness.

Source: Collaborating 4 Inclusion | Collaborating for inclusion of people with disability in the community.

Tasmanians need the skills and knowledge to manage risks relevant to them.

This includes:

• building everybody’s risk awareness and risk reduction knowledge and skills through inclusive policies to suit specific needs and address individual and local community vulnerability, capacity and exposure to risk;
• incorporating disaster risk awareness and risk management knowledge into formal and non-formal education, professional development and other training; and
• applying risk information to reducing disaster risks and preparedness.

Source: P-CEP Tools | Collaborating 4 Inclusion