Towong Shire, Gateway Health and Red Cross partnered to deliver the free one-day training sessions in many of the smaller bushfire affected communities in North East Victoria.

Bushfire recovery officer Jessica Davison said it had been hard to make connections with isolated communities.

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"We find that if we're offering something practical and useful for the farming communities like the working dog trainings, people are happy to have a day off the farm," she said.

"It's a useful day for them, but all the other benefits that go with it are wonderful to see: people are learning, but you also see people opening up a bit, sharing experiences and making new friends.

"And the real highlight for me is to see there's lots of laughter and chatting going on, so lots of nice new connections."

Gateway Health bushfire recovery case manager Marije Vanepenhuijsen said community connection was a significant part of disaster recovery.

"That's been lacking throughout the pandemic," she said.

But Ms Vanepenhuijsen said the trainings were an "amazing" chance to create connection and informal mental health support.

"By mingling and having a chat over lunch often things will pop up and you'll actually capture people who are struggling or triggered by something and probably didn't realise," she said.

"Then we can refer further support, so it's captured people that otherwise probably wouldn't have been captured, which is a really great success."

Towong Shire mayor Andrew Whitehead said the bushfires were still raw for many people.

"Some people were really badly affected, so it takes a long time to get to this stage where they're even possibly ready to come socialise," he said.

"And COVID just set us back that far from where we should have been...we're two and a bit years in, but we might be in the same spot that we are now 12 months ago if we hadn't had had COVID.

"We're really thrilled."

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