Energy Ready: Empowering communities to build energy resilience

Valente, Policy Associate: We're proud to fund this project through our grants program as a collaboration Grant this meant we had the opportunity to work alongside the project Partners the UTS Institute for sustainable Futures Community power agency and parallel lines to bring this from an inspiring idea to a groundbreaking piece of work the energy ready project aims to gather lessons and best practices on community energy resilience so through extensive desktop research deep Community engagement collabor operation with experts in energy resilience and Disaster Response plus a human- centered visual design approach the project team was able to translate the findings into a one-of-a kind resource for communities
Niklas, Research Consultant: The definition of community energy resilience which we proposed in the literature review says that um resilient communities um are communities that utilize localized energy sources in order to prepare so that's to learn and to anticipate to respond and withstand and to recover from disasters and so they also include aspects of social connections and social learning they include economic aspects related to affordability and accessibility and of course it includes Renewable Energy Technologies and any Technology Solutions 
Walters, Community Power Agency: As a partner Community par agency uh brought out for fa itation skills and um engagement uh skills in figuring out who the communities should be that we are talking to who are the correct people to come along to the workshop to give their insights and experiences what they've been through in these disaster affected communities and atrisk communities and designing an interactive process that makes communities and people then in these workshops feel comfortable and able to express what they' had been through and do that deep thinking to to share their experiences with others 
Gerrad, Community Power Agency: It's really essential that things like this are actually grounded in lived experience and the way to do that is to go and listen and hear from communities that have gone through experiences like environmental disaster such as a fire or a flood and hear about what they've done and then ground anything that you're wanting to inform other communities to help them prepare 
McPhersen, Workshop Participant: things that I'm worried about in terms of resiliency are the short-term um emergency situations that we're finding ourselves in whether that's bushire or flood but I'm also worried about the long-term energy resiliency of communities what I learned today were about understanding how this sort of energy resiliency happens at different levels and in different locations at the short the sort of more immediate short term it made me start thinking about how I respond to an emergency situation and what the community needs needs to do and what I need to do as part of a community in responding to an emergency situation 
Gaul, Designer: One of the things that we thought about with this project was that resilience comes from working out what you need to do for yourself so we've designed a guide that isn't just about giving people information and advice but giving them the opportunity to develop their own approach to energy resilience 
McGee, Research Director: So some of the main challenges we faced there were two really the first is um that energy resilience is quite a complex topic so really translating something that's quite complex into something that makes sense for communities and the other challenge is that the topic can be quite distressing for people because you know especially communities who have been through disasters so trying to really portray the information in a way that's authentic and doesn't deny the seriousness but it's also very upbeat and constructive and says here's what you can do 
Valente, Policy Associat: The energy Rating tool kit was produced in consultation with communities for communities and we really want it to be used it contains seven steps to guide and help communities leverage their unique features examine the risk they face identify shared priorities and develop a plan of action for improving energy resilience so we encourage communities all across Australia to access this Rich resource use it and reuse it as many times as possible and tell us how the energy ready toolkit made them a stronger safer and more energy resilient 
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