Rebecca Riggs

As the Principal of HighGround Communication, empowers others to respond to the challenges of both adversity and growth: whether that be reframing personal trauma, communicating in a crisis, emergency and disaster, or facilitating organisational change.

She works to examine how the stories we tell ourselves define us and impact our ability to transform our expectations, our environments and ourselves. Narrative, motivation, connection, complexity, symbols and values are her stock in trade.

Rebecca Riggs also empowers those whose role it is to speak to and for their organisations. She supports them in finding the insights necessary to find the unique, authentic teller of the story that they need to be; to give them the capacity to change and grow their own story, and to share those changes in ways that resonate and ignite a spark.

She has worked with emergency management and communities before, during and after natural disasters. Her research project - Understanding Resistance to Disaster Messaging, with Dr Lynda Shevellar (a Lecturer in Community Development at The University of Queensland) has been published in AJEM (Australian Journal of Emergency Management). Rebecca Riggs is a Fellow and active member of EMPA (Emergency Media and Public Affairs), has been appointed the Co-Chair of the EMPA Knowledge and Development Committee and is a Fellow of the Centre for Emergency and Disaster Management (CEDM).

Rebecca has worked with sectors as varied as mining and child care to create systems to deal with adversity and to create the organisational capacity to use them. She has lectured at universities in Queensland and NSW and trained countless professionals on the importance of messaging and detailing the impact of narrative on who we think we are – and what we can become.