Elly Bird is a Councillor on Lismore City Council and the Coordinator of Resilient Lismore, a community organisation leading recovery efforts in the Northern Rivers after the region’s worst disaster in living memory. Elly is a prominent community leader with lived experience in recovery across multiple events; flooding in 2017 and 2021; bushfires in 2019-20; the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2022 floods. She is deeply engaged in the complexities of building community resilience to better enable communities to withstand the shock of disasters and is passionate about the critical need for effective partnerships between governments and communities as climate change becomes increasingly prevalent in our daily lives.