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A force of nature: Luciana builds connections and sustainability in Melbourne's Western suburbs

A case study

Prepared by The Resilience Canopy Team
Published 15 October 2026

Intro

Luciana has always been passionate about nature, connection, culture, and giving back.

Very soon after she arrived in Australia with her family in 2011, Luciana began joining community groups and volunteering in and around Point Cook in the City of Wyndham, VIC. To her, it didn’t matter that she could barely speak English – there were people she could connect with and support anyway; this is the Luciana way.  

15 years on, Luciana is an exemplar of a local leader in action, someone who dedicates much of her free time to her community. Her latest project, RAICES Latino Hub, aims to create spaces where traditions thrive, friendships grow, and everyone feels included.  

The Resilience Canopy is supporting Luciana and RAICES to build connection, kindness, and cultural pride, by guiding the group through our Six-Step community engagement journey to identify and action priorities that matter most to them, and with a $25k Canopy Activation Grant.  Keep reading to discover more about Luciana and RAICES Latino Hub…

Luciana's background

Luciana was born and raised in Argentina. As an adult, she worked as a journalist in different cities and countries in South America.

“I saw firsthand a lot of social injustices, and the first signs of what [we now know] as climate change, with the most vulnerable people living in the most disadvantaged situations, and the government pretending they didn't even exist.”

She vividly recounts seeing abandoned families left to live in cardboard houses on top of a rubbish dump in Ecuador. She has other stories along the same lines.

When Luciana moved to Australia with her husband and two children in 2011, they planned to stay for two years. But in the end, contrary to what Luciana thought at the beginning, she was the one convincing the family to stay.

“Please let's stay because I love Australia,” recalls Luciana. “The nature spaces, the environment, all the beaches with nature around, no people, it's just for you to enjoy and relax. I also loved the number of opportunities I saw on serving the community. They say, ‘your home is where your heart is’. And I quickly grew to love Wyndham City.”

Feeling grateful for being able to mingle with the community and connect with people going through similar experiences, Luciana threw herself into every community opportunity she could find, volunteering for five, six, seven organisations a month: charities supporting asylum seekers and refugees, social agencies, community groups assisting people with housing and employment, beach clean ups, her church.  

“Wherever I see outcome, I don't mind the name of the group. If we work together, we will achieve even more,” she says. “Everything I do in the volunteer space, I do because I appreciate no one can pay for that. Because the value of giving is not money driven. It's heart driven.”  

With these values and passion, it was only a matter of time before Luciana would create something special of her own…

Forming Raices

Around 18,000–22,000 people of Latin American background live across Melbourne’s western suburbs, one of the most diverse areas in Australia. The City of Wyndham alone has seen significant growth in recent times.

Given her constant volunteering and connecting, Luciana has met more of these newcomers than most. While many arrive simply looking for a different future, some have suffered political persecutions, others are under humanitarian situations. But no matter their diverse backgrounds, one commonality Luciana kept noticing was the lack of connection.

“Social isolation, especially with the language barrier. People are secluded, people are not feeling the belonging we used to have back in our countries, where you open your door and all your neighbourhood is sitting there, and the kids are playing soccer on the street.”

Formed in 2015, RAICES aims to bring people together in a welcoming space where anyone can feel comforted and supported.  

As well as being the Spanish word for roots, RAICES is also an acronym:

‍Resilient Amigos: Building strength together as friends and allies.
‍Inspiring Commitment: Encouraging dedication to community well-being.
‍Empowerment: Giving individuals the tools and confidence to thrive.
‍Stewardship: Caring for our heritage, environment, and future generations.


"“RAICES is based on the connections I have made all these years with wonderful, like-minded people I cross my path with, and hoping to build a community based on ‘solidaridad’ [Spanish for solidarity and heart], a society that thinks about others,”
‍
— Luciana, RAICES Latino Hub

Compassion is the key. On any given day, RAICES connects migrants going through similar experiences. Or supports parents navigating an unfamiliar school system or with ways to help their kids who are struggling, perhaps with cultural differences. Or welcomes locals who are socially isolated; people experiencing mental health issues or with a type of disability.

To build this connection, RAICES runs a series of activities. Most Sundays, they hold a big working group where people contribute through art, play soccer, mingle, drink yerba mate, eat empanadas. It provides a great opportunity for community members to share parts of their cultures and speak in their native languages (or practice a new one).  

RAICES also organises a hike called Walking and Talking Amigos every second month, exploring local areas through a social and wellness lens. This addresses a gap Luciana has identified: the people she meets, even those who have lived in Australia for years, often have not explored their natural surroundings. She attributes this to a lack of transport and needing to drive and know where to go, and people not feeling totally safe without someone knowledgeable. As a result, the walks have proved a huge hit...

“People feel connected…with us, with nature, with each other, with themselves. They arrive not knowing what to expect, and they all leave smiling. When we reach the top of the mountain – wow, the faces, the smiles, the contentment that comes into the soul because they are there. For me, I have no price to pay for that!”

For those who wish to talk, Luciana sometimes shares prompts around social issues or environmental challenges, asking what they think we should do.

And Luciana insists the impact of helping others connect with nature goes even further. “If you love nature, you will care for nature. But if you don't know what you are trying to care for, you are blind. Once you open up, once your eyes are open, you cannot unsee it.”

RAICES also holds fundraisers. In 2025, their event brought attention to the plight of orphans in Peru, with the funds going to an orphanage there.

“Together we can grow, we can learn, we can educate, and we can support as a family,” says Luciana.  

Luciana's engagement with The Resilience Canopy

In 2024, as Luciana was thinking through sustainability stewardship for future generations, she came across The Resilience Canopy’s Practitioner Training.

It clicked: the dots between a community conscious of its challenges, planning for solutions and regaining the agency to do things within its scope to build resilience, improve its sustainability, and thus provide better foundations for her children and future generations.

Another thing Luciana liked about the Canopy was the flexibility of our Activation Grant funding, which RAICES was awarded in 2026, to help the group progress through the discovery phase of the Six-Step Model.  

“Canopy gave us the seed to start working and planning for that future we want to see,” says Luciana. “We need to work in partnership. No one can do it alone. And the more people, interest, support, and understanding we gather, the better the outcomes for everybody.”

One immediate action has been a community survey RAICES has created to help understand firsthand what the community values most, the biggest challenges people are experiencing, and what type of activities they would like RAICES to support and create.

“The listening part is very important for us,” says Luciana. “We want to reach more community members, educating them [around] how we can be better prepared, how we can be ready. It's not about being negative. It's about being conscious of the need, what we are lacking… lack of communication, lack of understanding, the language barrier, social isolation. But we cannot be spectators. We need to come and take our space.”

So far, the identified community challenges include the need for better public transport and emergency preparedness, and addressing the rising cost of living, social isolation, and lack of adequate heating and cooling in homes.

To start addressing emergency preparedness, RAICES is running a workshop in October 2026 based around The Adaptation Game (TAG), a fun, educational board game that uses storytelling to help people prepare for climate change and disasters by putting them in situational emergency scenarios.

RAICES’ community survey and regular events will enable them to keep engaging their community in creative ways, connecting people together through their popular activities, and identifying community-led actions to help solve their community challenges.

And the Canopy looks forward to being there to support Luciana and RAICES on their journey towards a brighter, more sustainable, more caring future…

“That's our bigger goal. We need to care,” says Luciana. “If we don't do the caring, if we don't build a kind society where we look after each other and we think and consider someone else beyond ourselves, it's not going to be strong, or sustainable. We need to look after the most vulnerable, work together, make that person be strong, make that family be strong, make that community be strong. And then we will expand and make other communities as strong as ours.”

Luciana's full-circle moment

RAICES may still be hitting its stride, but Luciana’s passion and spirit has already rubbed off on her family.  

Her elder son Joaquin works at CleanHub, an innovative organisation that reduces plastic waste, which partnered with Beach Patrol 3030 and RAICES on a recent beach clean-up. Her younger son also joined, using his drone to capture footage for the cause.

Supported side by side by her husband and sons, what began as values planted at home has grown into both professional pathways and a shared family commitment to the community.

“It’s a complete full-circle moment and such a ‘proud mum’ moment for me, seeing one son turn this passion into his career at CleanHub and my younger son using his talents to capture and share our message, while my husband stands beside us supporting everything we do for our community... This for me is beyond my own expectations!”