Andrew Forrest plans a volunteer army to tackle bushfire resilience

Forrest’s nationwide corps of volunteers will work in and with communities to help improve their efforts to resist bushfires.

Head of the Minderoo Foundation Fire and Flood Resilience initiative, Adrian Turner. Picture: Britta Campion

Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest’s $70 million bushfire charity is working on plans to assemble what it hopes will be the biggest volunteer army of its type in the world to help address disaster resilience across Australia.

The Minderoo Foundation’s Fire and Flood Resilience initiative, which will on Monday announce its latest “mission” to improve community preparedness, is aiming to formally launch the as-yet unnamed volunteer corps later this year.

Head of the initiative Adrian Turner told The Australian the nationwide corps of volunteers would work in and with communities to help improve their efforts to resist bushfires.

“We want to set out to create a resilience-focused national volunteer program that has nationally consistent training and certification to be able to add value at a community level to lift resilience. That’s a game-changer,” Mr Turner said.

“Right now we’ve got amazing organisations, for example the RFS and the Country Fire Authority where people will help to put out a fire, but we don’t have the same sort of co-ordination around how we lift resilience in communities before those events happen.”

Volunteer numbers across the country had fallen in recent years, exacerbated more recently by the pandemic.

Statistics from Volunteering Australia, Mr Turner said, showed that the most active volunteer age brackets were 40-to-50-year-olds and 70-to-80-year-olds.

Karen O’Connor, who is leading the mission, said she expected the fire resilience volunteer corps would resonate with a younger generation.

“If you think about the things that younger people are passionate about, adaptation to extreme weather and climate issues are actually really front of mind for younger people,” she said.

Minderoo has been heavily focused on developing preventive measures that will reduce the impact of bushfires since the fire and disaster resilience initiative was launched last year.

Dr Forrest and his wife Nicola committed $70 million to bushfire relief and resilience during the bushfires that devastated parts of eastern Australia last year. Mr Turner said the bushfire initiative was lining up a “major” capital injection.