Celebrating achievements - Dr Isabel Cornes

AIDR would like to congratulate our very own Dr Isabel Cornes, Senior Project Officer, Knowledge Development, for recently graduating her PhD.

The increasing number of disasters has meant that there is a growing expectation on emergency management volunteers to get involved in community engagement activities to help households prepare for natural hazards.

Isabel’s PhD examined why emergency management volunteers in Victoria choose to participate, or not participate, in community engagement activities. Her thesis also looked at the different types of community engagement activities that volunteers are doing and how effective the volunteers thought these engagement activities were for helping households prepare.

Her research found that having unit or brigade leadership that valued and supported community engagement was a key factor in volunteer participation. It was also important to have other volunteers in their unit or brigade that were supportive and joined them in community engagement activities.

Finally, while further training and resourcing is needed to support volunteers to feel confident in undertaking community engagement activities, there was also a need for emergency management organisations to trust volunteers to be flexible in how they do community engagement – so that engagement activities were relevant to the circumstances of their community.

Congratulations again Isabel!