Reflections on Resilient Kurilpa’s National Community Award Win

Resilient Kurilpa has just been named the National Community Award winner at the 2025 Resilient Australia Awards — an incredible recognition for a small volunteer team working on the ground in inner-city Brisbane. With a moment to breathe, I’ve been thinking about why this project worked, and what this win actually says about community resilience in Australia.

1. Convergence Matters: Right People, Right Time, Right Window

Every successful community initiative has a moment of convergence — a point where people, timing, capability, and context align. Resilient Kurilpa was no different.
We had the right team, the right energy, and a very real window of opportunity after the 2022 floods. A year earlier and the community appetite wouldn’t have been there. A year later and momentum would have dissipated.

People often think outcomes like this are simply the result of hard work and dedication. And they are. But timing is an underrated force. Hit the moment, and things move. Miss it, and even excellent ideas can fracture or fade.

2. Meeting the Needs of the Award Organisations (and Why That Mattered)

One thing that became clear during the submission: the awards are looking to recognise connected, tangible community action. Not long strategy documents, not abstract frameworks, and not one-off announcements — but real people working with real communities on real problems.

That is exactly what Resilient Kurilpa is.

Because the work itself fit what the awards were trying to surface and support, the application almost wrote itself. In a sense, we solved the problem the award organisations face every year: finding authentic, grounded community action that demonstrates resilience in practice rather than rhetoric.

3. The Uneasy Line Between Government Responsibility and Community Action

Looking across the winning projects, something else stood out: they were not all comparable in scope or impact. Some were community-led and place-based. Others were more traditional government programmes presented through a community lens.

It highlighted a persistent tension:
Where does government responsibility end and community responsibility begin?

Flood resilience, climate adaptation, emergency preparedness — these are core government functions. Yet almost none of the award-winning projects were wholly community-funded or community-resourced. Not ours either.

That’s not a flaw. It’s reality.
But it does raise the question: is complete separation between government and community even possible here? Or desirable? The best resilience outcomes nearly always sit in the messy middle — co-created, co-funded, co-delivered.

4. Excellence Is Personal, and It’s Never Finished

Finally, something more personal. Excellence is not a fixed bar — it’s an attitude. It is a willingness to push, refine, iterate, and care. Resilient Kurilpa succeeded because a group of people decided that our community deserved the absolute best we could offer.

There is still plenty to improve. There always will be. But this award recognises that we showed up, did the work, responded to our neighbours, and built something with integrity and ambition.

And that’s what makes community resilience worth investing in — not the award, but the commitment behind it.