A tale of many cities: How Ballarat will persevere after repeated tragedies

The national media wonders if the city will ever recover.

While these recent events have meant that the media spotlight has been on the trauma in our city, it's also important to acknowledge the complexity of who we are - because in addition to being a city that has recently experienced trauma, Ballarat is also a Welcoming city, a Garden city, an Historic city, a Creative city, a Sporting city, and yes, a Compassionate city.

Holding all these identities together as we continue to develop an overarching narrative of our city is worthwhile, because we know that communities and residents who are supported to connect, do well.

The need to create social contexts for cooperation and caring is timely and important work.

In his latest book of non-fiction, The Way We Are, the social scientist Hugh Mackay AO writes that humans are born to cooperate, communicate, connect, and contribute - that being human is a shared experience and not an individual one.

He notes that we need our communities to nurture us and provide a sense of belonging.

So, it's vital that our city is not defined by just one aspect of its recent experiences, and compassion helps us to do that because it explores what motivates humans to care for one another.

The City of Ballarat formally signed the Charter for Compassion in October 2019 with an aspiration that 'Ballarat become ......a compassionate city where community connection, health and wellbeing is a high priority - a welcoming, inclusive, and active city - demonstrating our shared values'.

Compassionate Ballarat is a volunteer group that draws on both the value and science of compassion to guide its work with the city in achieving these aspirations.

Many studies, including those by Dr Julian Able in his work on compassionate communities in the UK, have found that communities who can create social safeness are healthier than those who do not, and this in turn results in lower costs by way of reduced usage of its health services.

Ballarat already has many community support groups, including Neighbourhood Houses, Good Karma Network, Food is Free Laneway, Eureka Mums, Men's Sheds, Styled for Success, Soup Bus, Compassionate Ballarat, Shower Bus, Walking Groups, Tool Libraries, Community gardens to name but a few, and these groups enable our residents to gather and flourish in social safeness.

In The Way We Are, Hugh Mackay writes that it's easy to wring our hands about the state of the nation, but not so easy to admit that it's our own behaviour that helps to determine the shape our society is in.

Therefore, the challenge for us all is to reflect on how, our behaviour and that of the groups we belong to, are contributing to the Ballarat we want to create - so that indeed we can live in a caring and compassionate city with an overarching identity of one that meets the social safety needs of all its residents.