The story of our African Family Support program, and a few words from our CEO, Karen Field on the importance of longer term funding, and what partnership really means.
This program seeks to holistically support local African Australian Families. Four years ago this agency had a desire to ensure our Family programs and services were relevant and responsive to the complex needs of a much marginalised and vulnerable group within our local community – our African Australian Families who have settled in Australia. So often funding requires us to fit people in to programs, but we need programs like this one that allow us to wrap programs around people – based on their needs and aspirations for their families. Four years ago this project was funded for two years – and this initial funding has been extended each year until this year, when we received the amazing news of a three year commitment by FaHCSIA through the Community Investment Program.
Most of us who have been around know that the words ‘partnership’ and ‘collaboration’ are bandied around so much in the world of welfare and government without a real definition of what it means to partner. In our case we felt that we can go some way to defining these terms and what they mean to us.
Firstly – it is a partnership between our programs, services and staff. With African workers and the African community and the broader community learning from each other and co-developing programs which share cultural understandings and experiences , and thus developing ways and models of working that have a real chance of supporting African families towards health and wellbeing. Our family support worker, Sahra and I have been on this journey together for past four years – through this time I am sure she will agree we have learned so much from each other and I cannot thank her enough for sharing her religious and cultural knowledge, her settlement experience in both New Zealand and Australia, and her journey as a worker, mother and grandmother. This funding I know represents far more than just a program for her community, to her it personally represents financial security for her family which is a rarely acknowledged benefit of recurrent longer term funding .
Secondly – with regard to our program partners – this program has been able to achieve what so many organisations and governments find very difficult to achieve, it joins all the dots, it brings health and wellbeing programs, employment programs, education programs and literacy programs together. All the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that need to be addressed in order to support African families reach their goals of physical, mental and emotional, social, economic and cultural health. It reflects the mobilisation of energy and goodwill in a local community – it requires us to understand each other’s frameworks, share ideas, knowledge and skills and more importantly bring our financial and human resources to partner with the community and plan our programs and work together in meaningful ways.
The last part of the partnership– and it is often not recognised or acknowledged, is the partnership drummond street has enjoyed at the local level with our funding contact staff for this program at the state office of FaHSCIA- they have been part of and at times great supporters of the learnings of this program, they have been flexible to program changes that so often are required in community development work, they have engaged with us on so many levels in order to understand the challenges of this work and been incredibly encouraging – I want to collectively thank them for their efforts and support throughout the last four years and look forward to our future learning together. For a non-profit to have such a relationship with government is a testament to the people involved, and to a shared vision and desire to support this community.
Karen Field
CEO
drummond street services
Tags: African Australian, Community, FaHCSIA, Family support, Partnership
