Community-led resilience in action: Lessons from Cyclone Alfred and Resilient Kurilpa
8 September 2025
Community-led resilience is a phrase often spoken. It’s easy to assume it means “locals helping out” or “grassroots support.” But true community-led resilience is far more than neighbourly goodwill and a promise to help clean-up—it is organised, proactive, informed, culturally grounded, and place-specific. During Cyclone Alfred in March 2025, Resilient Kurilpa (RK) showed what it really looks like in the Brisbane suburbs of West End, South Brisbane and Highgate Hill.
What is community-led resilience?
Community-led resilience is not a supplement to government emergency response—it is a parallel system of preparedness and response powered by local knowledge, relationships, and leadership. It is built before the crisis and activated during it. It adapts faster than formal systems because it draws on real-time experience.
In Kurilpa—a flood-prone peninsula in inner Brisbane with over 80% of residents living in apartments—RK’s model has been years in the making. After the 2022 floods, residents asked:
What do we need to do for each other?
The answer: build a framework that belongs to the community, shaped by its diverse needs, and kept alive through everyday relationships.
What it looked like during Tropical Cyclone Alfred
When Tropical Cyclone Alfred formed in late February 2025, RK and its partners didn’t wait. From the moment the system was expected to impact Brisbane, a hyper-local mobilisation began—stretching from the 20th February to 12th March and led by community leaders, apartment residents, support agencies, and volunteer networks already woven into the Kurilpa Peninsula.
Image: Tropical Cyclone Alfred on Wednesday morning. Source: Weatherzone.
This wasn’t a reactive scramble. It was a calm, informed, and decentralised response powered by trusted people who knew what to do—and knew each other.
Here’s how it unfolded:
Feb 25–27: Internal conversations begin as forecasters indicated that TC Alfred may turn back into the Queensland coast in coming days. RK and the West End Community Association (WECA) prepared for possible impact.
Mar 2–3: With forecasters firming up their view of TC Alfred’s path to impact Brisbane, community outreach accelerated. RK shared early preparation videos; WECA coordinated with housing providers, schools, elected reps, and community services—activating relationships built through years of collaboration.
Images: @resilientkurilpa
Mar 4–6: As Cyclone Alfred neared, RK and WECA delivered daily, localised communications across social media, reaching thousands. Video updates included apartment-specific checklists, insurance tips, and info on sandbagging, bin safety, and school closures. Services were mapped and translated.
Mar 5: A cross-sector “all-hands” meeting was convened by community leaders and elected officials. The needs of renters, rough sleepers, First Nations elders, and people with disability were actively discussed and addressed through community channels.
Mar 6–7: RK’s apartment flood information goes viral on social media—Leanne Sturgess’ apartment prep video garners over 13,000 views, while Adrian Sains’ lift protection clip surpasses 300,000 views. Community organisations posted service directories, safety advice, and shelter options.
Image: @resilientkurilpa’s reels posted during Tropical Cyclone Alfred amassed hundreds of thousands of views.
Mar 8–10: The cyclone weakened into a tropical low but delivered significant rainfall. Community updates continued, including Energex alerts, transport disruptions, localised flood risks, and hygiene reminders. RK posted a riverine flood update viewed over 2,500 times.
Mar 11–12: The system passed. RK and WECA shifted into post-event communications—focusing on mould prevention, special kerbside collections, sandbag disposal, and renter support. More than 1,250 people visited the RK website during this window, with high interest in the Apartment Toolkit.
Image: RK’s free Flood Mitigation Plan template is one of our most sought-after resources and available for download from our Apartment Toolkit.
Across this period, RK and WECA published more than 40 posts and videos, reached tens of thousands online, and kept vital conversations flowing across buildings, services, and neighbourhoods.
Meanwhile, community members supported one another with on-the-ground help—sandbagging, information sharing, shelter referrals, and welfare checks.
Importantly, no single body “owned” the response. This was not disaster management handed down—it was resilience, grown and activated from the ground up.
Video: Volunteers help residents collect sandbags, 5 March 2025. Video sourced from @trinamasseygabba
Three pillars of community-led resilience
1. Community trust, not just information
RK didn’t just broadcast emergency facts—it built a foundation of trust well before Cyclone Alfred. Through story-sharing, peer-led workshops, and resources co-designed with apartment residents, RK created a local knowledge system that people recognised and relied on.
When the cyclone approached, thousands turned not to anonymous alerts, but to trusted neighbours and familiar local voices—like Adrian Sains, Helen Abrahams, and Leanne Sturgess—whose videos combined credibility with lived experience. This trust enabled faster action, calmer decisions, and stronger collective confidence.
2. Activated informal networks
RK’s power wasn’t centralised. It existed in a mesh of relationships—between tenants, building managers, community workers, elected officials, and everyday residents.
These connections, forged through years of collaboration, lit up as Alfred neared: WhatsApp groups buzzed with logistics; Micah Projects and Emmanuel Mission mobilised rough sleeper service; apartment buildings checked basements and elevators; school councils translated alerts into multiple languages.
These weren’t spontaneous efforts—they were the result of slow, deliberate network-building that turned neighbours into first responders.
3. Disaster-specific, people-specific response
Cyclone Alfred wasn’t treated like a generic flood event—and RK didn’t deliver generic solutions. Each part of the Kurilpa Peninsula responded according to its needs: apartment residents prepared lifts and basements for potential power outages from high winds far earlier than potential flooding, rough sleeper hubs opened across multiple sites, vulnerable elders were checked on via trusted First Nations networks, and parents received tailored resources through school channels. Even sandbag updates and bin safety posts were hyper-localised.
This was a people-first response: specific, grounded, and shaped by the actual risks facing the actual people on the ground.
The long view: Why this matters
“Resilience” is often used as a catch-all term—a vague hope that people will cope. But Kurilpa’s experience shows what community-led resilience really means, and what it takes to make it work.
It’s not just about bouncing back. It’s about creating the conditions where communities can act early, calmly, and collectively—with or without official direction.
RK’s response to Cyclone Alfred didn’t rely on luck or instinct. It was the result of years of preparation, relationship-building, and lived experience turned into practice.
The difference was visible in every action: apartment mitigation plans already in place, lift shutdowns enacted before power outages hit, mental health support flowing through informal networks, and communication that was trusted because it was local.
This wasn’t just better messaging or quicker coordination. It was a system of care and capability that filled the gaps traditional emergency response cannot always reach—because it started from inside the community itself.
That is resilience in action.
It is relational.
It is local.
And it works.
As governments—local, state, or federal—believe that community-led resilience is a critical part of disaster preparedness and recovery, then Resilient Kurilpa is not just an example.
It’s a blueprint worth backing—and replicating.
Sebastian Vanderzeil is an economic advisor, Director of Strabo Rivers, volunteer member of WECA & Resilient Kurilpa.