What is Resilience First Aid Certified Training (RFA)?
Resilience First Aid (RFA) is a mental health certification that teaches strength-based skills to support resilience in others. You will learn how to spot signs of low resilience in others, learn the language to talk proactively to people in need, and learn skills to help build their resilience.
This makes RFA a highly proactive approach to the prevention of mental ill-health.
In addition to the two-day training course, you’ll also get the following resources to keep learning and build resilience:
- 12 months access to the accredited Driven Resilience App with full mental health and resilience training courses. This is a comprehensive digital resource that includes daily resilience building activities to continue learning beyond the certification.
- Your own Resilience First Aid Responder Kit – a set physical resources to facilitate conversations. This includes a comprehensive Responder Manual with all the course content, a RFA wallet card with key information, magnetic resilience skill tiles, domain skill cards, resilience ball, resilience pocket guide, waterproof notebook, and more to help you keep the concepts alive and visible
- Community access to connect with other responders and people interested to build the resilience of others and themselves. Share ideas and challenges, helping to build a movement to be proactive about mental health
RFA is designed to benefit a diverse range of people who are interested in fostering resilience and promoting mental wellbeing in their communities, workplaces, or personal lives. The target audience includes individuals from all walks of life.
What are the details?
The workshop will be facilitated in person by the Iris Foundation.
Date: Saturday 7th March & Sunday 8th March 2026
Time: 9.00 - 4.00pm
Location: Hay (Exact venue to be advised closer to date)
Places are limited. You will recieve an email with confirmation of your place on the workshop.
This training is supported by firsthealth Limited and Murrumbidgee Primary Health Network Community Grants through the Australian Government’s PHN program.
Why Resilience First Aid?
- Only 1 in 10 people have resilience that’s strong enough to protect against mental illness. This means 9 out of 10 of people can benefit from increasing resilience skills to boost protection against depression, anxiety, and other forms of mental ill-health.
- 50% of people will experience a period of mental illness in their life, but only two thirds will feel confident to talk about it with someone they trust.
- In Australia, the mental health crisis costs somewhere between $43 billion and $51 billion per year, while a further $130 billion is the cost of the loss in productivity due to the mental health issues.
We want to strengthen our ability as a community to boost our youth and our people more broadly.
Resilience First Aid is about being proactive. It equips individuals with strength-based skills to help build resilience in themselves and others in the community to prevent mental health problems. This differs from Mental Health First Aid training, which focuses on identifying and responding to mental health problems and crises after they have formed.
We are looking to develop and embed community resilience champions – people that are on the ground supporting resilience through natural everyday interactions, using supportive language and showing how practical skills can be put into action.
Who should attend?
RFA is suited to a broad range of community members (18+) – from teaching coaches how to build resilience in teams, to giving employers the skills and tools to recognise signs of low resilience and use proactive language to build up staff.
Essentially, it is valuable for anyone that is involved in our community. Through collective action, we can build a common language and approach to strengthening and supporting ourselves, our families, friends, workmates and community.