Andrew Monteiro
Maribyrnong Flood Community Recovery Committee
Tell us about your volunteer role
I’ve been part of the Community Recovery Committee (CRC) for 11 months. The CRC is made up of community members impacted by the Maribyrnong River flood in 2022. We meet monthly, but lots of the work happens in between meetings with phone catch ups about projects or talking to the community. Since I joined, I have been working on a major project – the Flood Insurance Guide, which has just been launched. As a volunteer, I worked very closely with Council and Gen West, and we’ve already had feedback from the community that it has been useful.
What difference does volunteering makes in your life?
Volunteering has helped me focus on the more important things. I was a corporate Project Manager for many years, and this has been the most fulfilling project I’ve worked on. This has given me more satisfaction. Working with the community has helped me with my mental health.
How do you believe your volunteer work has made a positive impact on the Maribyrnong community?
Since the floods happened, I’ve worked very closely with local community around insurance. I found that people didn’t know where to start when making their claim, and there was so much ambiguity about what could be done. So we tried to help each other by sharing our experiences. When I was successful in getting what you would call a settlement with my insurer, I shared what I did with the community. Since then, about five people changed their approach with their insurer and have had a successful outcome. That’s when I thought we need to document these things so that people understand and know where to start. So the insurance guide came out of that.
In line with this year’s NVW theme of "Connecting Communities”, how does your volunteering help foster a sense of connection, both for you and others?
It’s important when you join a committee like this that you have your ears to the ground and you are talking and listening to people. If you really want to help, to add value, then you need to talk to the community directly. Recently a man in his 80s came up to me and said, “I would like to have coffee with you”, because he’d seen my photo in the insurance guide, and he and his son had both been affected. The biggest stress for everyone was more than the actual damage caused by the flood. Because that's in the past. But how do we recover from that? And one of the biggest problems was that people did not understand where to start. So with this insurance guide, it may not answer all your questions, but it definitely will lead you to ask the right questions.