Advancing community resilience through Millgrove Resilience & Recovery Hub

Our proposals (by MRAG) centered around both the energy infrastructure resilience - a solar & battery islandable system on our community hall, to keep the lights on when the grid experiences prolonged outages from storms and fires. The other about social resilience - knowing who is who, what our capabilities are, and how we can build community reslience over time.

Together our grants totalled about $300k - huge thanks to AusNet for that support.

For most of 2025, in my spare time, I was part of a small team making things happen behind the scenes to coordinate the projects and workshops to make these happen, evaluating and reporting on these.

You can see the infrastructure part of the project in this short drone flyover video:

Our local paper came out to cover our ribbon cutting event too:

https://upperyarra.mailcommunity.com.au/news/2025-08-28/switching-on-resilience-at-millgrove/

We were also lucky enough to have the funding for a couple of workshops to engage our community in both community reslience and the decentralised energy transition.

Decentralised Energy Systems

Community Resilience

With thanks

AusNet's Energy Resilience Community Fund has made some great things possible by injecting resources into the hands of community. More resources of this type are needed across Australia to build community resilience, and address the likes of extreme heat at a collective level - through infrastructure as well as socially.

Energy Resilience Community Fund - AusNet

We are committed to connecting communities with reliable, affordable and sustainable energy, and delivering long-term benefits that leave a positive legacy in the communities we serve.

Home, AusNet logo

Reflection

These sorts of initiatives don't happen without lots of people coming together to write grants, coordinate buses, organise catering, get the word out, give up their weekends, advocate to council and politicians, and so much more. Huge thank you to all those who made these happen.

We're also only in Phase 1 - building the foundations of community resilience, but there's still a big journey ahead. Find out more about Millgrove's journey and how you can support or get involved here:

Resilient Millgrove – Millgrove Resident Action Group

Millgrove Resident Action Group

Millgrove has also been a frontrunner and supporting the journey of many other communities, so shout out to The Resilience Canopy who are providing support to other communities seeking to learn from and adapt this to their own communities:

The Resilience Canopy | Home

The Resilience Canopy is a nationwide program with a growing network of partners and communities. Building and sharing knowledge about ways to build resilient communities, this evolving community of practice aims to create a ripple effect that will embed itself for generations.

Australian Charities & Not-for-Profits Commission{blogPost_authorFullname}{blogPost_authorType}

If you're interested in the report backs, here they are!