After the Utopia: Rethinking Recovery Before the Next Crisis
This is the 4th and final blog in our series focusing on key challenges for communities vulnerable to climate related disasters. A list of related articles can be found at the end of this blog.
Disasters don’t just damage roads and buildings; they disrupt the invisible threads that hold communities together. In the early days after a crisis, there’s often a powerful sense of unity. People show up, neighbours help each other and online groups come alive. This fleeting sense of connection is sometimes described as Disaster Utopia, a brief period when solidarity feels natural, and community spirit is at its strongest.
But that feeling doesn’t last forever.
As the urgency fades, so too can the connections. If recovery is mishandled, poorly funded, or driven by systems that don’t understand the local context, that early unity can quickly give way to stress, disillusionment and disengagement.
This article explores what happens after disaster utopia. Drawing on insights from Monash University’s Fire to Flourish report, ‘Lessons Learned in its Activation’, and our own experiences in the Dandenong Ranges, it highlights five key lessons about recovery and what happens when those lessons are ignored. It also asks a harder question: if we know that connection is the most valuable thing we have in a crisis, why do we so often fail to protect it in the months and years that follow?
We don’t talk enough about what happens next. After the adrenaline fades and the headlines move on, communities are left to navigate an exhausting, often invisible second act. Support drops away. The rhythm of normal life returns, but rarely as it was. Recovery becomes less about clearing debris and more about managing slow, quiet disconnection. Without the right structures and support, that disconnection can deepen.
For groups like MotHs, one of the complicating factors is how online disconnection can spiral. In psychology, this is described as online disinhibition — the way people behave with less restraint in digital environments than they might in face-to-face settings. While benign disinhibition can encourage people to open up and express themselves more honestly (Schouten et al., 2007), sadly, toxic disinhibition can be equally common. It can create a sense of detachment from others and from consequences, making it harder to resist the urge to use threatening or hostile language (Suler, 2004). Under pressure, especially in the aftermath of disaster, this can turn digital spaces that once felt safe and supportive into environments marked by tension or conflict. Concerningly, this distorted experience begins to influence how people perceive the broader community, regardless of whether it reflects reality.
That’s why recovery must be handled with intention (and why MotHs works so hard to produce a range of events that keep this community connected and the good vibes coming). How the months after a disaster are managed can either strengthen the social fabric, or fray it further. A recent report by Fire to Flourish, drawing on research from communities impacted by disaster and climate disruption, outlines five key lessons that resonate deeply with what we’ve seen here.
First, recovery needs to begin immediately. When communities are left waiting for permission, paperwork, or delayed funding rounds, they are left to shoulder the heaviest burdens alone. In our case, it was local knowledge, informal networks and neighbour-to-neighbour support that kept people going. A small amount of timely funding or formal recognition could have made an enormous difference.
Second, lasting recovery takes long-term investment. Most funding cycles end just as communities are beginning to understand what they need. Six to twelve months of support might get you a clean-up crew, but it won’t rebuild trust or confidence, or keep community groups from collapsing under the weight of burnout.
We’ve worked incredibly hard to extend that feeling through community events, volunteer programs, and regular opportunities for people to come together in ways that feel joyful, purposeful and safe. We know however that without consistent support, even the most committed efforts to sustain connection start to fray. That’s why short-term funding models fall short: they overlook just how long it takes to rebuild social cohesion after crisis, and how fragile it becomes once the urgency has passed.
Third, recovery must move at the pace of trust. Local people know their communities. They know who is vulnerable, who is quietly doing the heavy lifting, and how things actually work on the ground. Outsiders, no matter how well-intentioned, often miss that. Recovery is most effective when it is co-created with the people who already hold that trust.
Trust doesn’t magically appear during a disaster, but it is built in the quiet, everyday interactions, shared projects, and mutual understanding that precede them. Those interactions extend online and in our area, local online groups now have tens of thousands of members. We’ve seen how these spaces become crucial communication channels following an emergency, yet there is often little to no relationship between the group moderators and local emergency services or the council. We believe that’s a missed opportunity. Building trust across these networks before disaster strikes isn’t about control, it’s about clarity of roles, shared understanding, and creating the kind of coordination that allows communities to respond effectively and safely when it matters most.
Fourth, no two communities are the same. A town with one road in and out will have different needs than a densely populated suburb. A community recovering from bushfire will face different risks and emotional terrain than one rebuilding after a flood. Policies must be flexible enough to reflect the cultural, geographic and social landscape of each place.
Finally, communities need to be resourced to lead their own recovery. Not as token voices in someone else’s agenda, but as genuine decision-makers. Often the most effective responses come from within communities, by the people already doing the work, even if they don’t hold an official title. Community-led grants are the go to for involving the community but too often they contain a fatal weakness; funding projects and resourcing the community rarely extends to the leadership needed to coordinate and achieve them.
Resourcing the community should mean funding the people who coordinate them. We saw many promising initiatives fall over after the 2021 storms, not because they weren’t needed or welcomed, but because the locals running them were expected to squeeze them in after work, during dinner, or on the one free weekend they had in a month. These were people already recovering from disaster themselves, trying to keep their households afloat while also holding the emotional load of community care. Burnout wasn’t just a risk—it was inevitable. And we have to ask: if emergency services don’t expect their staff to deliver recovery support unpaid, why should community leaders be held to a different standard? Living in a high-risk area may come with a sense of responsibility, but there’s a limit to what unpaid labour and goodwill can achieve. Properly funding coordination isn’t a luxury. It’s the foundation of any recovery effort that aims to be lasting.
These lessons from Fire to Flourish are especially important to remember now, before the next bushfire season begins. If we wait until smoke is in the air to think about recovery, we’ve waited too long. What happens now, the relationships we build, the resources we allocate and the systems we rethink will shape what happens then. Disasters may be inevitable, but disconnection doesn’t have to be. It’s shaped by how recovery is approached, and whether those leading it understand both the social and physical terrain. The challenge isn’t just to rebuild homes and infrastructure but to rebuild confidence, trust, and the invisible threads that hold communities together. That work doesn’t start after the fire. It starts now.
References
Schouten, A.P., Valkenburg, P.M. and Peter, J. (2007) 'Precursors and underlying processes of Adolescents’ online self-disclosure: Developing and testing an “internet-attribute perception ”model', Media Psychology, 10, 292–315.
Suler, J. (2004) 'The online disinhibition effect', Cyber psychology and Behavior,7, 321-326.
Walden, I., Bos, A., Rogers, B. & Werbeloff, L. (2024) Fire to Flourish: Lessons Learned in its Activation, Fire to Flourish, Melbourne, Australia.
Related articles:
https://www.mumsofthehills.com.au/news/building-resilience-through-connection
https://www.mumsofthehills.com.au/news/national-volunteers-week-2025
https://www.mumsofthehills.com.au/news/stepping-up