Sam Henderson stepped into the role of CEO at Northern Rivers Community Foundation (NRCF) in August 2022, six months after the initial impact of the floods that hit northern New South Wales and south-east Queensland that are now Australia’s costliest natural disaster.

Though the wreckage of the flood has mostly been cleared and infrastructure is slowly being restored, the crisis is far from over, Sam says.
“There is still so much need within our communities,” he explains. “There’s a misconception that these communities are ‘on the road to recovery’ but the reality is that road is a really long journey. More than 8,000 homes were significantly damaged – and as many as 6,000 are uninhabitable – and 10,000 people who have been displaced.
“We often hear from our communities that they’re tired of talking about wellbeing or attending community concerts – they just want their houses back!
Harnessing knowledge
One of a community foundation’s greatest strengths is its local knowledge and proximity to the people and places it serves. The Northern Rivers Community Foundation stayed on the muddy frontlines with its communities and local non-profits throughout the flood crisis.
In the immediate post-flood period, with services and accessibility heavily impacted, the knowledge sharing, deep experience and strength of the community foundation network proved to be invaluable.
“It was an organic network response,” Sam says.
“The Foundation was able to reach out to other community foundations that could talk to their disaster experience, post-disaster which really allowed us to shortcut the knowledge gap and more quickly adapt to the conditions.
“For instance, we might talk to someone who says, ‘Oh, you should talk to this person’ and then that person says, ‘Yes, and you need to speak to this other person too who knows about this’ and so you sort of naturally follow these flows of information.
“And of course, there were people contacting us, so it became an organic type of process of going to different nodes for valuable information as the impacts unfolded. And I guess that’s reflected in how we worked in the community too, where we became a node for lots of the grassroots community groups. And then in each community, those groups would be a node within their community.
“In that way, you had this quite organic and efficient information filtering system. So, it wasn’t command and control – it was like a spiderweb.”
Part of NRCF’s response included direct outreach to 300 local organisations to ascertain immediate and ongoing needs.
There’s a misconception that these communities are ‘on the road to recovery’ but the reality is that road is a really long journey
“Luckily some foundation partners stepped in and said, ‘You’re going to need some help’ and we were able to get some interim admin staff on board to help carry some of the workload,” Sam explains.
Among the agile funding flowing into the Northern Rivers region and NRCF was support from Australian Communities Foundation’s National Crisis Response Fund and the ACF giving community which responded quickly and generously.
“The support that came in from other foundations like ACF was critical,” Sam explains.
“It meant that our team was able to respond quickly – they were literally talking to people who were cleaning up in the mud. The highway was cut for over a week, people didn’t have computers, the internet was out and phone reception was patchy but we made all those calls within four weeks of the first flood and added to it again when the second flood hit a month later.
“It was just asking simple questions like, ‘What’s going on for your organisation right now? How are you faring? What do you need?’ and it helped us get a much clearer understanding of the bigger picture.”
The knowledge and information gleaned from that activity has now been compiled into a robust data set which NRCF continues to add to.
“We’ve reached out to our network again, more than a year later, because what we really want is to be able to track that data over four to five years so that we can measure the health and recovery of the grassroots sector in the Northern Rivers,” Sam says.
Recovery isn’t a one-term grant. There’s the immediate recovery which we’re all still working through but then there’s the recovery of longer-term operational aspects
“I suspect it will become an important analysis for understanding what really happens post-disaster.”
One of the biggest concerns reported by the grassroots groups NRCF has canvassed is ongoing funding support. More than 60 per cent of organisations have reported they are expecting a funding gap when recovery funding runs out in the coming months.
In addition, 62 per cent of community organisations reported that their staff continue to experience mental health challenges as a result of the floods and associated community trauma. The community recovery rating for the Northern Rivers, highlighted in the newly released NCRF Flood Report is 4.8/10.
“The truth is, the crisis isn’t over, our communities haven’t recovered,” Sam says.
“Recovery isn’t a one-term grant. There’s the immediate recovery which we’re all still working through but then there’s the recovery of longer-term operational aspects and that’s something that will require more money because it’s a much longer journey.”
Powered by community
Not surprisingly, 2022 was the biggest year in NRCF’s history, with $2.9 million facilitated and distributed across six grant programs and over $4 million raised with partners to support disaster response, women’s empowerment, affordable housing, education, environment and community grants.
When asked about the most valuable lesson NRCF learned during such an intensely challenging year, Sam says it was the importance of prioritising grassroots community groups.

“These groups make up the social fabric, particularly in smaller communities,” he says. “They can really help in the immediate holding of community and recovering of community – they’re essential.
“Community foundations inherently understand the importance of grassroots because that’s where we work.
“We understand that they need to be supported to respond quickly in the face of disaster in terms of hard practicalities, and we can be there to help them more quickly than a lot of government agencies by supplying an immediate small inflow of cash,” Sam continues.
“What I’d love to see long term is that we build funds that sit there ready to go for these sorts of emergencies, funds that can go straight out using all the due diligence that community foundations have done using their knowledge of local networks. That way we can say to these groups, ‘Do you need money? Here it is,’ and they can get on with doing the good work on the ground.”
For the communities in the region, the prospect of another natural disaster isn’t a case of ‘if’ but ‘when’. As the impacts of the climate crisis continue to exacerbate the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, Sam says a regional vision that focuses on the bigger picture of rebuilding and regenerating the region is sorely needed.
“Specifically, how do we rebuild and regenerate the Northern Rivers in a way that won’t be so badly impacted by the next disaster?” he says. “How can we do it in a way that doesn’t contribute to climate change? How do we give our communities a sense of influencing a bigger global picture?
“That’s an important discussion that needs to happen so our communities have a feeling of hope and a sense that there’s something we can all be doing.”
NRCF’s Resilience and Regeneration Fund continues to seek support to strengthen recovery and resilience in Northern Rivers communities around disaster recovery and preparedness across the early, medium and long-term recovery phases.
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Images courtesy of young Northern Rivers photographer, Ari Messina.