FCAWA was thrilled to win a 2025 Resilient Australia State Award, in recognition of our project, ‘Building Financial Resilience to Disasters: The Financial Counselling Disaster Framework‘ which was completed together with the Centre for Social Impact at The University of Western Australia.
The Resilient Australia Awards (RAA) recognise collaboration and initiatives across a broad range of sectors that strengthen disaster resilience and award images capturing resilience in action. FCAWA’s award-winning Framework has been developed to inform the financial counselling sector and the broader community on the role of financial counselling in disaster preparedness, response and recovery across Western Australia.
“Financial counselling is an identified key component of support needed to reduce risks and improve the resilience of communities experiencing natural hazards,” says FCAWA CEO, Melanie Hopkinson. “The Framework is a dynamic mechanism that guides the sector on the activities it can perform to better prepare communities for natural hazards and when they strike, it can ensure a more effective response to assist communities to recover and ‘bounce forward’. The Framework is also intended to be shared with different organisations to improve their understanding of the support that the financial counselling sector can provide in disaster management,” she added.
The Framework was developed over a two-year period. Since publication, the Disaster Framework has been presented at the 2025 Australian Disaster Resilience Conference 2025 and FCA National Conference and has been referenced in FCA National training. FCAWA acknowledges funding from the Western Australian Government through the National Disaster Risk Reduction (NDRR) 2022-23 Competitive Grant Program, which supported this project.
As the State winner, this project has now been shortlisted as a finalist for the 2025 National Research for Impact Award which will be announced in Melbourne on November 24.
A copy of the Disaster Framework and related documents can be found here.