In the last decade, rural communities have experienced cumulative hardships leaving little time for recovery between events. The Rural Adversity Mental Health Program (RAMHP) is famous throughout rural NSW for its "Boots on the Ground" approach to supporting rural communities when times are tough.

Declared Disasters are only part of the picture for rural communities. Biosecurity incursions, plagues, fluctuating commodity prices and personal losses also have long-lasting impacts on the resilience of communities but offer opportunities for working on community-led solutions.

In this presentation we’ll share how we’ve applied RAMHP’s “Way of Working” across different communities and in response to a variety of recent events including the Varroa Mite incursion, QX disease in oyster farms, White Spot in Prawns, Broken Hill power outages and the Singleton bus crash. RAMHP works before and after disaster to foster resilience and empower rural communities.

Whilst every rural community and every person’s experience is unique, we explore what our program has found to be effective across a range of events. We discuss our program model and how we leverage Place-Based Responsiveness and Collective Action to ensure that we are responsive to each community, whilst maintaining program fidelity and teamwork across the state, ensuring individuals and communities remain connected, supported and stronger in the face of future challenges.