Identifying organisational emergency preparedness: A field test report on the application of the Resilient Community Organisations Toolkit from the Australian Council of Social Services

This report details the field testing of an existing organisational preparedness tool, the Resilient Community Organisations (RCO) toolkit from the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS), for disability inclusive disaster preparedness.

With the support of ACOSS, the project team field tested this RCO toolkit as one element of the Phase 2 Local Emergency Preparedness Workshops and continued this in Phase 3 of the project conducted in the three study locations in October 2016. Workshop participants and other community service organisations and organisations representing people with disability were invited to review the usefulness of the RCO toolkit for their organisation using a specifically designed review format. In total, 17 participants from 12 organisations reviewed the RCO toolkit.

Overall the RCO toolkit was regarded favourably as a useful resource to assist community service organisations in assessing, benchmarking and improving their organisational preparedness for natural hazard events. There were also some drawbacks to applying this tool in the disability sector. From the review feedback, three areas of recommendations for improved relevance for the disability sector were formulated: dissemination, utility and applicability. These are presented at the end of this report.