My journey into welcoming work

Most of my professional and personal life has centred on social change. My networks are filled with people who have causes that they are passionate about or questions they spend time trying to understand. Leading people, I learnt the value of carving out spaces for people to work on things that they care about.

My burning cause has for a very long time been ‘welcome’. How do we create communities that truly welcome newcomers? How do we ensure that they have the same opportunities to participate as everyone else? Much of my career journey and my adult life has centred on driving change in the context of this cause. 

Many people have asked me how it all started. This is a question that I’ve asked myself recently as I’ve been reflecting on driving social change and how we can be more effective as humans in making things happen. For me it all started with a story - with connecting to a story.  

It was early 2001 before 9/11, before Tampa, before ‘children overboard’. Not long before ‘boat people’ became the political hot potato that they are today. I was a first-year political science student at UWA and knew very little about what it meant to be a refugee. I was interested in getting involved in campus life and meeting new people. I suspect this is probably how I ended up attending a forum where I was first exposed to the experiences of refugees in Australia. At this event a gentleman had been invited to speak about his experience being detained, due to a visa mishap, at the Perth Immigration Detention Centre. During his short stay, he had spent time learning about the circumstances of the twenty or so asylum seekers in the Centre. He spoke about parents who had been separated from children, someone who was sixteen and a man who had been languishing there for over three years. I really knew very little at this point and had never been involved in any form of activism. There was something in the story of what he witnessed and heard that struck a chord with me.  

I just couldn’t understand the injustice of it and felt a strong urge to find out more. So I went along to a small demonstration that the organisers of the forum were promoting. At this point, the people from the story I had heard had had very little contact with the outside world; the immigration system did everything it could to prevent this. In order to receive visits, letters or phone calls, outsiders needed to have the ID number and full name of the person they wished to see at the Centre. Additionally, the asylum seeker needed to have the full name and details of the visitor on their list of approved visitors. Having this level of information on one another was quite difficult to achieve. The organisers of the demonstration had made previous requests to establish contact with asylum seekers, but these requests had been denied on the grounds of it being a violation of the privacy of those inside.  

There was a small crowd of about 30 people who were gathered outside the fence of the Centre – a big imposing wall with barbed wire between us and the mostly young men who were inside. Something really special happened on that day. A soccer ball flew over the fence. The ball had been cut open and there was a piece of paper inside. The paper had a list of names and ID numbers. We wrote our names and phone numbers on a piece of paper and threw the ball back over the razor wire. This act of human connection marked the start of a journey which, for me, involved many weekends on the other side of the fence, providing practical support and friendship to some remarkable individuals. As a 19-year-old university student, it would be no understatement to say that this experience literally blew my mind. My world had been so sheltered, knowing nothing of loss, displacement, war, injustice and trauma. Suddenly this was all around me. I felt a deep connection with their plight and found it unfathomable that these people who had come seeking safety in our land of opportunity had been made to feel so horribly unwelcome.  

I felt a big weight on my shoulders. I developed skills in organising. I developed the ability to share stories to connect with others and motivate them to get involved. Together with a few other fellow students we established the UWA branch of the Refugee Rights Action Network (RRAN). I was that student in front of lecture theatres explaining to other students why they should invest their time in supporting this cause. I was deeply connected to the community that I was advocating for and spent many evenings penning letters and answering phone calls from people in detention. I organised several trips of students up to the Port Hedland Detention Centre. On these trips we would spend a week camping and visiting asylum seekers, listening to their stories and providing them with practical support in the way of phone cards to call their families, toys and books for the children and clothes.  

Many of them said that our small acts of welcome and practical support kept their spirits up and provided a counter-narrative to the messages of ‘go back to where you came from’ that they saw in the newspapers and their TV screens.  

Activism and the emotional toll of supporting many people in detention burned me out after five or so years. The vicarious trauma of listening to stories, making the arguments over and over and not seeing any shift in policy was exhausting.  

I stepped back from activism and found other pathways to make a difference. After graduating, I got my first job as a caseworker for newly arrived refugees who had been resettled through Australia’s humanitarian program. This was an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of those who had been granted asylum by Australia and to ensure that their experience of this new land was as welcoming as possible. I learnt many things through this one-to-one work. I learnt about the many skills, talents and strengths newcomers bring with them, and about the resilience they have developed through overcoming challenges that are beyond the frame of reference of most Australian born. I also learnt about the barriers that prevent many of them from reaching their potential. 

In the decades to follow I devoted much of my professional career to looking for solutions to these barriers. Working for two of WA’s most culturally diverse local governments provided a great canvas to play on. In local government I learnt to appreciate the value of grass roots welcoming work. People’s experience of welcome is shaped by the interactions they have at a local level and the opportunities and resources that their communities provide access to.

I’m grateful for my formative experiences and for the many opportunities I’ve had to make an impact on issues that I care deeply about. Those close encounters I had with some incredible human beings in my early twenties brought injustice into sharp focus for me. Their stories of resilience are what inspires me to make a difference.

If reading this inspires you to reflect on your own social change journey I'd love to hear your from you.