AFNC and Blaze Aid partner up for bushfire recovery

THE Alexandra Football Netball Club (AFNC) will be hosting Blaze Aid for the foreseeable future at the club grounds, while the charity organisation works with bushfire affected farmers in the local area to repair broken fences.

President of AFNC, Kylie Cairns, and Simon Hardy, a Blaze Aid co-ordinator, discussed what this partnership means for the local area and the Alexandra community.

Kylie said that the football club was asked to play a number of roles after the bushfires went through, but they decided to focus on long-term recovery.

“That’s what I found with the footy club, when the fire first hit a couple of weekends ago, we were bombarded with can you be the resource centre, can you do this, can you do that?” Kylie said.

“Partnering with Blaze Aid, for us, is a better fit, because it’s more long term.

That’s what Simon and I have been working and talking about, quite considerably, the long-term aftermath of not just the event that’s happened, but three months, six months down the track. People are still cleaning up. There’s fencing.”

Blaze Aid utilizes volunteers to get out and about in the community, working with registered farmers on restoring fencing on their property to contain livestock.

They set up a camp, in this case at the Alexandra Football Netball Club, to act as a base of operations for their volunteers.

“The ones who lose everything are shell shocked and they don’t know where to start. That’s one of the things that Blaze Aid brings, we can go onto their property and talk with them,…

Image: Alexandra Football Netball Club President Kylie Cairns with Simon Hardy from Blaze Aid.