Community engagement at the Victoria State Emergency Service (VICSES) is guided by a strategic plan championing a vision of Safer Communities – Together. A key initiative in the strategic plan, ‘mainstream community resilience through our services structures and systems’, ensures community engagement is recognised as part of core business.
Supporting the vision of VICSES is the VICSES Community Resilience Strategy Renewal 2019-22, which includes the Community Engagement Program Framework – a combination of marketing, disaster resilience for risk reduction, and positive psychology disciplines. The framework itself was presented at the 2019 International Positive Psychology Conference (see Macdougall 2019). The focus of this poster presentation lies in magic that has been created through bringing the framework to life in a community engagement program called “Bag it, Block it, Lift it and Leave (BIBILIL)”. BIBILIL targets flood preparedness behaviour change,.
Following the 2010 – 2011 floods in regional Victoria, a VICSES volunteer leader realised many community members didn’t know simple flood preparedness actions. Actions such as how to sandbag their homes (bag it), block their drains (block it), remember to lift up valuables (lift it), and leave to get somewhere safe.
A decade in the making, BIBLIL was created by community for community. Community are encouraged to take small, autonomous action steps using principles found in Motivational Interviewing. Concepts such as ‘savouring’ are demonstrated through celebrating program success through volitionally generating, intensifying and prolonging program recognition. Meaning and purpose are created through program objectives.
Critically, BIBILIL encompasses fun animations set in regional Victorian and metro Melbourne with a catchy jingle, as well as live film footage. Within the BIBILIL suite, visual depictions of the diversity of Victorian communities can be found. BIBILIL is a community program with the ability to target young and old, multicultural communities, regional and metro.