We are an alliance of Northern Rivers arts organisations, independent artists, creatives, teachers and youth workers committed to supporting each other, collaborating and delivering creative recovery projects for our communities.

Who we are:

The Creative First Aid Alliance (CFAA) is an alliance of Northern Rivers including arts organisations, artists, creatives, educators, community, youth, health, and arts wellbeing workers, committed to supporting each other, collaborating, advocating for, and delivering creative recovery projects for our communities. We were initiated soon after the February 2022 major flood.

What we do:

CFAA exists to facilitate community arts and cultural development programs for community well-being, social cohesion, and recovery across the Northern Rivers region of NSW.  We are invested in the long-term activation of culture and the arts as a tool for preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery to disaster impacts, ensuring more resilient and healthy communities in the future.

We advocate for artistic representation and inclusion at national, state, and local levels on disaster recovery strategies. We believe a creative placemaking agenda is vital for the transformation of our communities, advancing sustainable social, environmental, built, and economic recovery needs whilst fostering a new sense of place, well-being, and cohesion for our region.

We work collaboratively with our communities and all stakeholders within the disaster management ecology. 

Why we do it:

The arts play a deep, real role in supporting our varied communities and individuals to reframe life, landscape, and connection before and beyond disaster impact. An arts/cultural response can mean many things including care, comfort, reduced feelings of isolation, increased community cohesiveness, empowerment, reimagining, celebration, memorialising, new personal and creative skills, strengthened connections to place, and a sense of shared optimism.

Through CFAA, local artists and communities are creating and achieving locally-owned visions and goals, putting local voices in the lead, building on local strengths, and collaborating across sectors.

Our Way

We strive to create spaces, events, and moments of creative recovery utilising our embedded values of: 

• Strong First Nation voice

• Strong Community voice

• A commitment to ongoing development to notions of best practice with the context of community engagement, trauma informed practice and access and equity.

• A dedication to inclusion and embedded best practice accessibility, informed through collaboration and consultation with people with a lived experience of access needs, Disability and Neurodivergent and Deaf and Hard of Hearing communities.

• A dedication to diverse inclusion, creating safe spaces for all people regardless of race, ancestry, age, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic, ability,  status, religious or spiritual belief. 

• A dedication to trauma-informed practice that focuses on the wellbeing of community through engagement with creative recovery practice.