🎧 Climate Change & Disaster Preparedness: Changemaker Chat with Red Cross Disastrous Dinners creator, Hayley Payne

Hayley Payne is a multipassionate changemaker who is currently working as a research assistant, doing her masters, and is the co-chair of the QLD Red Cross’s Youth Advisory Committee— amongst many other things. We recently sat down with Hayley, to discuss her journey as a changemaker into the social change space and her multiple passions, “disastrous dinner” the disaster preparedness Red Cross initiative she co-created.

In our recent podcast episode about Climate Justice, we discussed the difference between climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation. Climate change mitigation efforts are about reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and addressing the root causes of climate change. Climate change adaptation efforts, by contrast, are about making changes that will allow humans to cope with the challenges presented by a changing climate.

Climate change can increase disaster risk in a variety of ways – by altering the frequency and intensity of hazard events, affecting vulnerability to hazards, and changing exposure patterns. Disaster preparedness is an important climate change adaptation effort. Disaster preparedness will not prevent the effects of climate change, but can drastically reduce the impacts upon people and communities, by allowing people to be prepared for the increase of natural disasters that will come with climate change.

“I’m currently working as a research assistant in peace and conflict and I’m doing my masters in development specialising in climate change and disaster resilience, but then on the side and kind of involved in a few different projects in the climate change space, especially on a youth leadership basis…”

After finishing university and getting a job in what she thought would be her dream graduate program, she realised that it was not what she wanted in her life, and after what she described as a “quarter-life crisis,” she left her job and went into studying development. She volunteered with a range of development and humanitarian organisations like Oxfam and Oaktree, before she began volunteering with the Red Cross where she is now the co-chair of the Queensland Youth Advisory committee.

Hayley’s proudest achievement and impact in the social change space, is co-creating the Red Cross’s new Disastrous Dinner project, which has allowed her to create a practical, solutions-focused resource to help Australians prepare for disasters.

“I studied communication in my undergrad, and the courses that I liked the most with a crisis communication course, and is a very strange thing to say I’m a very introverted person and don’t like being in high pressure situations, but I really really like kind of solving problems. So I did that and then in the graduate programme that I was talking about earlier, I actually got placed in the Fire and Emergency Services here in Queensland for the first six months of the rotation programme’s listing and it was of definitely the funnest part of my experience and I think I kind of saw how we’re getting introduced into disaster preparedness in that space… and I don’t know I also think about it holistically and then I think for me when I says not realising that I wanted to do more with my life, I think that was the point when it was happening… And at the same time I was realising that disasters were kind of something that affected people out of nowhere and could affect anybody and they were like often the lowest point in a person’s life… but then I also really became interesting climate change around the same time, and just seeing that yet disaster resilience and disaster management often wasn’t included in those [climate change] conversations quite as much as it needed to be, and I suppose that’s probably where it came from.”

The idea for disastrous dinners started back in 2020 when Hayley had just joined the Youth Advisory Committee. The Red Cross already does so much in the disaster preparedness space and the organisation has a huge portfolio working with different levels of government, but she noticed that at the grassroots level people could be doing more to get prepared. After reflecting on the 2019-2020 bushfire season when her family’s home was 100 metres from being affected by the fires, she knew that it was important to start conversations and getting people in the community to get prepared.

The Australian Red Cross already has a great app called “Get Prepared” to help people come up with a disaster preparedness plan, but not a lot of people knew about it. So Hayley and co-creator Nataya came up with an interactive activity called Disastrous Dinner, where people can work through the app while holding a light-hearted dinner party.

If you’re keen to host your own dinner, you download the Red Cross Disastrous Dinner Host Guide