They are then brought to Australia by a nominating family or community groups, et cetera. And so, this is a program and a scheme that has worked in Canada for 40 years more than 300,000 refugees have been directly impacted by that scheme. It’s taking off in the UK, it’s taking off in Ireland, it’s taking off in New Zealand and many other countries around the world. In Australia we have this scheme too which allows community organisations and groups to be able to bring people here. But the nature of this scheme in Australia is quite limited. Instead of the way it works in Canada in that you privately sponsor a refugee family and that’s an addition to the Canadian humanitarian intake.

Here in Australia, the government has said if you ever privately sponsored a refugee that you and I might sponsor, we’re taking away a place from the humanitarian intake in Australia. It’s really like robbing Paul to give to Steve. And then on top of that, the costs are extremely high. It’s $50,000 for an individual and up to $100,000 for a family, which you can imagine is well and truly beyond the imagination of even our most generous neighbourhood organisations. And then the eligibility criteria is really quite tight as well. So, the My New Neighbour campaign since March 2018 has been calling for the improvement and overhaul of Australia’s model. And on that journey we have gained the support of over 30,000 Australians who signed a petition calling for improvements in over 30 local governments across the country. That’s metropolitan, regional, rural councils saying ‘yes, our neighbourhoods want a chance at this. And we would like for this program to be reformed.’ So, the Ministers have been getting letters from a range of Mayors, asking that community organisations, institutional groups, even AFL clubs have been getting behind the campaign, calling for the reform of this pathway.

It has shown a lot of promise, but as I stated, it’s not over until we get what we’re seeking, which we’re hopeful that we will get there. The Australian Labour Party last year at its national conference announced that it would overhaul a community sponsorship program more in line with international best practice if it was elected to government. The Australian Greens followed a week later and also said that they would commit to overhauling this scheme. And just recently here in 2019 in December, Minister David Coleman committed his government to evaluate the scheme in 2020. So, there’s all sorts of indications of hope and we will continue to advocate and I’m very grateful that the campaign which began with Amnesty International is soon to become a coalition campaign involving multiple organisations.

The campaign’s growing strong and the momentum is building and I’m very proud of the fact that one of the great things about this campaign is that it has begun to harness the interest and actively support refugee communities in Australia particularly, which is really important.

I can imagine from their perspective, a number of families and community members, desperate to reunite with family community overseas and who are stranded and waiting to be resettled. And in the absence of a functioning family reunion program in Australia, many people are going to significant debt to try and use this scheme to reunite with families through our sponsorship programs. So they are grateful that there’s advocacy happening on this broken model at the moment. It’s not just the people that we can bring here, it’s people here who are very distressed about this scheme currently being broken. We’re very proud of the fact that it’s not just people who are standing as allies with refugees, but refugees themselves who are actively involved in this campaign.

Yeah, and I think that’s so important. You’ve got to work with the people that are directly experiencing this. So in your experience with refugee communities, what are some of the opportunities in Australia that can ensure inclusiveness and support once we have resettled families here?

That’s true in a lot of the work that’s been done today, right across the country. And I think community sponsorship has the potential to really formalise a lot of relationships and initiatives that are already on the ground and very active right across this country. They’re from Coffs Harbour to Albury, Wodonga, even Armidale and in very conservative and progressive corners of this country. There are local groups that are saying, “look we’ve got a need and a desire to do tangible positive things that can help people step into our communities and feel like they’re a part of it.”

I think that the notion that we’re looking for is doing stuff with refugees, not for them or at them.

It’s that active sense of being able to create communities with our new neighbours and walking alongside us and giving them a sense of agency in that it’s not saying, ‘“Oh look, you should be grateful that we’ve saved you or done this thing for you, but let’s help each other build stronger and more resilient inclusive communities for the future.”

And I think that’s what the potential is about community sponsorship. If we can just have a decent model in Australia I think that it’s going to have a much bigger impact. And I think that’s what we’ve seen in Canada is that for the 300,000 refugees that were directly impacted, we need to think about the 3 million Canadians that were actively involved in settling their new neighbours. And that’s the figure that I think about and hopeful for Australia.

It’s this learning opportunity for everyone too. It’s not about, “Oh this is what we can do for you, you’re so lucky.” It’s like, “well how can we work together and learn from each other because there is so much that we still don’t know.” So around that, is there a language and a process that we should be using to engage stakeholders? You’ve got your My New Neighbour campaign, but what else can we do to, to see this positive social change? As Australian citizens, I think some people get a bit fearful of being offensive in some way.

Look, there’s many ways to look at that question I suppose. And I think one thing that we think about on the campaign constantly, is reminding everybody that’s engaging in media and social media that as much as the media or some parts of the media might want us to think that, no one in Australia wakes up wanting to be cruel, actively cruel to refugees with maybe one or two exceptions. But no one by and large wants to be nasty.

There’s a bit of a communications breakdown in this country and I think that we need to address that breakdown. And the part of that is looking at the stories and focusing on the stories of resettlement, focusing on the stories of how people are being supported, focusing on the stories of tangible initiatives that are taking place, every single day right across this country, which support successful resettlement of refugees.

I think that’s the responsibility that we have is to keep pushing the good news, is keep pushing the positive things that are happening so that people can get that sense of “Oh this is something I can do to help this situation.”

Not often do I get invited to speak about the work that I’m doing. And I try to talk about the fact that yes, we’ve got this massive global humanitarian crisis with refugees right across the world, but here’s a local solution to that and something that could work and it’s based on evidence.

It’s based on demonstrated performance elsewhere and there’s goodness in Australia to back it up as well. So it’s about reframing the conversation and seeing people as neighbours wanting to build community and not as us and them or someone from a third world or being able to create those divisions in the head, which sometimes makes the problem much bigger than it is. [It can make us think it’s] beyond our reach and our scope when actually we’re talking about our neighbours or our potential future; pathways to make them come and join us in our neighbourhoods. So the language that we think about is very much about ‘how do we humanise the people that we’re talking about here and how do we make it link back to everyday things that make us tick in Australia?’ I’ve spent a lot of time on the road with the campaign and there’s one thing that is common right across this country in it is that we would do anything for our neighbours. And, and I think that’s that sort of spirit which was underpinning the My New Neighbour campaign.

It’s human to human connection and it’s reframing the conversation; that is what we need to do.

You’re speaking at Newkind Conference this coming January in Marion Bay, Tasmania… what are you most excited about for this?

I think when you’re on the campaign trail, you can get really lost in your own theory of change and the work that’s happening and you become really passionate and wedded to it.

I think that one of the things that conferences like Newkind offer is the insight and the ability to hear what other people are doing in the methods and their ways of going about doing it. That’s been pretty cool, pretty critical for me; constantly learning and checking yourself on the campaign trail and going, “Hey, what else could I be doing better? Am I using the right language? Could I be doing more testing?”

That sort of indication that we need to be able to offer ourselves, I think is really, really important around listening to other peers and also just being able to connect with people and test new ideas against an audience as well to see how they resonate with it.

For me, conferences have certainly been useful in that way. And I’m certainly looking forward to going back a second time to the Newkind Conference and being able to look at what else other people are doing, but also share the kind of work that I’ve been doing and try and get some immediate feedback from the people that see my workshop.

Yes, feedback and the energy. It’s so nice to be around social changemakers. I feel like you come back with a renewed sense of like, ‘yes I am doing the right thing, this feels good.’

Which social enterprises do you believe are doing a great job at tackling social, cultural and environmental problems?

So the kind of social enterprises that come to my mind are the ones that bring people along the journey from a different range of perspectives. I live here in Castlemaine, in Central Victoria and down the road in Bendigo is an initiative called the African Food Safari that’s supported by the local ethnic community council. Bendigo [has] a lot of capacity of multicultural services. And their African Food Safari project, which they’re supporting is an initiative of a local African women who have created a catering business, which is focused on serving the immediate community. And it’s an initiative, which basically connects a thing that we all love, food, with their culture and history and story as an emerging community in Central Victoria to the broader growing diverse story of Bendigo. And it’s just something really tangible where people can come together over food.

It’s something that everyone does; food catering or providing food for events. And here they’ve made group of women doing this initiative, which addresses the need for them, employment and time, which fosters a strong community connection.

I’ve seen that same kind of initiative happen as well in a place called CERES in Melbourne. Tamil Feasts is another social enterprise which supports recently settled asylum seekers, through food and culture, and that group of Tamil men currently seeking asylum in Australia. And again, it’s making something that we’ve always enjoyed across culture, coming together and eating food and connecting it to a social issue or a challenge and making everyone feel a part of it. It’s that sense of being able to, in a nonthreatening way, insert questions and conversation about some common challenges in the community through something that’s fun and enjoyable, such as dinnertime.

Food is community building! You see it all around the world; people come together and share meals on the street and it’s an instant community builder in a nonthreatening way.

That’s right, and we were talking about communication and engagement before.

It is being able to look at the positive framing, look at the solutions, look at the tangible things that we can do in the face of frustration all around us sometimes. What’s really concrete about these ideas is that you can touch it and feel it and you can hear it, you can smell it, you can taste it. And it’s all of us doing it together when we come together for the African Food Safari or Tamil Feasts in Melbourne.

And I’m sure there’s many, many other initiatives like this, but when you think about social enterprise, that’s what comes to mind. It’s something that people quickly understand, stays with them and hopefully they learn something from it that they take forward.