DRAMA network

For so many people who find themselves in recovery leadership roles, the experience can be daunting and lonely. Disasters affect so many parts of our communities that often the recovery work people find themselves doing is an overlay and extension to their normal roles. 

School principals still need to be school principals, but now they’re doing it in the context of a recovering school community, often with damaged infrastructure and new challenges. Maternal and child health nurses still perform their nursing roles, but now with mothers, babies and families who are experiencing new pressures. Community development teams are still doing community development work, but on hyper-drive in a different context.

Wouldn’t it be nice just to be able to talk and get some advice from someone who has been where you are? Who ‘gets it’?

That’s the whole basis of the Disaster Recovery Advisors and Mentors Australia (DRAMA) network. DRAMA is hosted out of Australian Red Cross but has a steering committee of volunteers with lived experience of recovery leadership, and a growing network of mentors who are able to use their past experience to support people currently facing these challenges.

The idea of the network is that you can apply to have a mentor assigned to you who has experience in either the role you’re in or has some understanding of the challenges you may be facing. After you are matched to a mentor, you both work through a process to figure out what you want from the mentorship, how frequently you’ll meet and how you’ll structure it. A Red Cross person will check in to see how things are going, but it’s led my you and your mentor.

DRAMA has existed in a low key, semi-organised way for a long time and in the last few years has been more structured and formalised. 

If you’re keen to get some additional support in your recovery work by being partnered with a mentor, consider applying to the DRAMA program in 2023.

This is the last edition of #22 for ’22 and I have been holding off for a bit with this one, hoping for a DRAMA weblink to be live but alas it’s not available yet. I’ll update this post when it is for anyone searching in the future, but until then you can email me at kate@katebrady.com.au if you’d like to be connected to the program.

Thanks for hanging out with me this year :)