The Humanitarian Settlement Program (HSP) is currently looking after a cohort of just under 300 new arrival families in the region with five different language needs namely French, Swahili, Kinyarwanda, Burmese and Nepali.
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented quite a challenge, paricularly in supporting our families to understand the broader community messaging released in May about the easing of restictions in the State. The team adopted a strength based strategy for clear and consistent messaging to families. We continue to be guided by the bi-cultural team at Centacare Multicultural Services in this work, and we thank them along with the Community Engagement team for the collaborative support during this time.
Recently our team also had the benefit of joining with Community Engagement and the Dynamic Young Leaders project to take up a professional development opportunity to learn about the new Queensland Human Rights Act. Indeed, the training and opportunity to attend a Q&A forum facilitated by our community partner Luke Wenitong who is the FNQ Community Engagement Officer at the Queensland Human Rights Commission, was found to be very beneficial particularly to our team’s frontline workers. The team felt it was an excelllent refresher and asked the team to look at every interaction with our clients and ask, “Are we respecting our clients’ rights in every interaction we make with them?” This best practice reflection challenges us to remember the importance of human rights always, no matter how big or small the interaction or support required is.
The Humanitarian Settlement team is continuing to explore collaboration with regional and state partners in Health, Education, Housing and Family Wellbeing to strengthen and develop broader community partcipation opportuntiies for our new arrival families.
You can contact Centacare Multicultural Services by calling (07) 4242 1058 or by email to [email protected].
