PhD candidate Belinda Young recognised at Australian of the Year Awards

University of Melbourne PhD candidate Belinda Young has been awarded Victorian Local Hero at the 2023 Australian of the Year Awards.

The Local Hero Award recognises Australians who have demonstrated community spirit and dedication to improving the lives of those in their neighbourhood.

Ms Young received the award in recognition of her work with the online community Mums of the Hills, a group that was created to empower individuals in her local area with a platform to share vital information.

During the recent pandemic lockdowns, Ms Young created mental health and food resource directories for local businesses and provided practical support after natural disasters by organising insurance, bushfire preparedness, and chainsaw workshops.

Ms Young said: “I started the group because research shows that a connected community is far more likely to respond and recover from disasters better. Building that social capital is incredibly important - education with the right kind of engagement allows discussion, and then prevention is possible.”

Ms Young’s PhD is focused on the effectiveness of online communities in promoting place-based action for the prevention of bushfires. Using case studies in California and Victoria, she is looking at the work that is being done to reduce the occurrence of human based ignitions to counteract the natural increase in the occurrence of bushfires as a result of climate change.

“The hardest thing about preventing a bushfire, or the pandemic, is that you can’t see what you’ve prevented, and it's very hard to promote the things you haven’t done. In Australia we are conditioned to expect that bushfires will happen to us. There is a great one liner they have in California, they say one less spark, one less fire. If we focus on the ignition source rather than just stopping a spark that has come from a pre-existing fire, then we are more involved in the process of prevention,” Ms Young said.