Community stories eNews: 24 April 2024
Youngman Creek rehabilitation volunteer wellbeing program
The Namabunda property, situated in what was once the Big-Scrub subtropical rainforest covering over 75,000 Ha of the Northern Rivers, has degraded over the past 30 years – since its days as a lychee farm due to a lack of maintenance.
Bundjalung Tribal Society (BTS) is primarily a housing organisation providing social housing for the Aboriginal community in and around Lismore in northern NSW. They inherited the property and have spent many years, with volunteer support, trying to rehabilitate it to use for cultural activities and ecological preservation, planting bush tucker and medicines, running training and capacity building programs. Despite their efforts, setbacks like bushfires and the COVID pandemic have hindered progress. Community engagement, vital for sustaining the project, has waned due to volunteer fatigue and lockdown restrictions. BTS see the degradation of the Youngman Creek on the property as symbolic of the broader environmental and social challenges facing the community.
The group sought funding to help mobilise the community and resource them with support and infrastructure, expert training and capacity building to rehabilitate the Creek.
“By rehabilitating the creek, we rehabilitate ourselves and our community.”
With a grant of $9,997, supported by GlobalGiving, the group hosted a series of events at Namabunda which attracted significant community participation, including:
- Build community cohesion through shared activities and cultural workshops.
- Provide training in bush regeneration and ecosystem management for volunteers, especially in photographic monitoring of weed removal and tree planting;
- Offer wellbeing support and workshops led by qualified counselors to address the emotional toll of recent challenges.
- Deliver Bundjalung cultural and ecological knowledge workshops, installing didactic signs about the work to increase awareness and use of Bundjalung ecological knowledge and language, and explaining and demonstrating the value of a healthy waterway ecosystem to neighbouring landowners.
These events will integrate practical activities, such as weeding and planting, with educational sessions on assisted native regeneration techniques. A focus on the Youngman Creek watershed aligns with the project’s theme of “renewal” and underscores the interconnectedness of environmental and community resilience.
Moving forward, Namabunda serves as a model for holistic, community-driven land management that nurtures both people and the environment.
“The thing we are most proud of is the sense of belonging and identity that we have generated through this project in response to the fires, pandemic and then the floods. The thing that was most successful is the deeper engagement between Bundjalung people and non-Indigenous people. The connections that we have built up over the last 18 months is really beautiful to see”.
