1 Jul 2020
Additional projects to help with environmental and school recovery in East Gippsland after the summer’s devastating bushfires, round out the Ross Trust’s response to the early 2020 crisis.
Almost $250,000 from the Trust has been granted to post bushfire response projects to help disaster-affected communities start the long road to recovery.
After the loss of their school, students from Clifton Creek Primary School had to find a different way to take their classes.
The trust made bushfire response grants of $10,000 each to Clifton Creek Primary School and Toorloo Arm Primary School for the purchase of additional devices to allow students to undertake classes on their computers whether they are at school or at home.
A small school, providing a unique learning environment to a farming community, Clifton Creek Primary School was destroyed in the January bushfires. Toorloo Arm Primary School, at Lake Tyers, was damaged and many families were impacted by the fires.
Providing funds for the purchase of laptops, iPads and appropriate software addresses online learning needs now and will ensure better crisis management for schools, in the event of future natural disasters.
The Trust made an initial grant of $50,000 to the FRRR Disaster Resilience and Recovery Fund in January as an immediate response and then took time to consider how best support recovery activities.
With a focus on environmental recovery, the latest grant decisions at the June Trustee meeting extended this bushfire response with four additional grants to the East Gippsland Landcare Network and the East Gippsland Conservation Management Network.
The East Gippsland Conservation Management Network will undertake rainforest regeneration work with the help of a $34,000 Ross Trust grant. The Network was also awarded $29,500 for owl recovery of threatened and endangered species.
These funds will go towards helping ensure habitat is retained to enable three large forest owl species – the sooty, powerful and masked owls – to survive and have a future.
The East Gippsland Landcare Network will implement two further programs with the assistance of the Ross Trust:
The Landcare Network is also a recipient of a three-year Ross Trust biodiversity conservation grant for their Lungs of the Lake project.
Rounding out the Trust’s support for bushfire recovery, is a $25,000 grant to BirdLife Australia to contribute to supporting the long-term recovery of wildlife after the fires.
In other bushfire-related news, the National Bushfire Recovery Agency and Services Australia have launched a new website Recovery Connect. The site links the public to the available bushfire recovery services in their area.
We’ve added this link to our Useful links page.
