Creating workplace diversity
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Michael Moriarty, Acting Manager at the Darebin Information, Volunteer & Resource Service (DIVRS), explores how a multicultural workplace can diversify clientele and expand the outreach of organisations. Michael addresses some challenges that organisations may face in recruiting volunteers of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
This film was made as part of Spectrum Migrant Resource Centre's 'From Receivers to Givers' program, which seeks to promote organisational change, raise awareness of benefits of engaging volunteers from culturally diverse backgrounds and support interested community members to get involved in volunteering.
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Transcript
Michael Moriarty
Darebin Information, Volunteer & Resource Service
Being of the cultural mix in our municipality, a lot of our clientele, probably most of them really, are from cultures other than White Anglo-Australian, and where English is their second language or third language. So if we are finding it hard to understand a client, quite often now we have someone in the place that can either speak fluently in their language or can actually understand the issue better than we can, whether its language or culture that's making it difficult for us.
And then that then fosters more and greater clientele again, and then it kind of spreads from that. And then the volunteer who's helped us out by being able to translate or converse in that other language – it helps us out because they feel like they are doing a really important job – which they are – and then they stay with us, because you can lose a lot of volunteers when they're not feeling appreciated or they feel that what they're doing isn't important, so you get all these two and three way streets start happening and those benefits really spread.
Workplace diversity
The reason our organisation, if you walk into it, seems so multicultural and reflects the community we're in (which is the City of Darebin) is because simply by having a greater cultural diversity in your workplace or in your organisation just seems to very quickly promote further multiculturalism. We know from our own volunteers, that they’ve said to us sometimes, when they're from a culture rather than English or White Anglo-Australian that they immediately felt more comfortable because they could visually see a mix of cultures, and quite often cultures similar to their own or their own.
So, I would suggest to organisations that they could very quickly become more representative of their clientele or the community they're in, by just putting in a little extra effort and just being conscious that you want to increase that cultural diversity.
Overcoming challenges
We do see organisations, or individuals within the organisations, sometimes a bit reticent when they perceive that the volunteer's English language skills are not as proficient as perhaps they would have hoped. But the reality in most cases that we come across, is that the English being a second language or a third language for that volunteer in no way stops them from doing a brilliant job in the actual job. It's very rare, I think probably, that they wouldn’t be able to be placed in a particular job, doing particular tasks, because their first language isn't English.
Mutual benefits
If people perceive that it's a bit more difficult I think they'll find a) the benefits far outweigh any difficulties they've perceived and b) I think once they start putting a bit of effort in and changing their thinking a bit, they realise that there's actually not much effort required. So we would never take a backward step now from the sort of cultural mix we have and being much more conscious of how to make people from other cultural backgrounds more comfortable in our organisation.
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