Fresh ideas for working with culturally diverse groups
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Kelsey Schwabe is the Acting Manager of the Ecumenical Migration Centre, which sits within the Brotherhood of St. Laurence. Kelsey discusses how adopting good practice in the management of volunteers has overcome challenges. She provides practical tips to other organisations to assist them in creating a valuable, diverse workplace.
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
Kelsey Schwabe
Brotherhood of St Laurence
The benefits to organisations can be huge – I mean from local councils to organisations that deliver services or even products, if they think about their target group, it's not a monocultural target group. So if they have CALD volunteers working alongside them that offers them a really great chance to learn about the communities that they are trying to reach so that they can truly understand their communities.
It also means that they can reach those communities and we've had great experiences of CALD volunteers who will go out and promote our services that we're offering, or our programs. And they do it at bus stops, they do it at train stations, they grab other members of their community; they can speak to them in their own language and they know how to draw them in. So that's the benefit to organisations.
And then on the other hand, you have the community members who are getting access to resources that they might otherwise not have known about.
And then for the individuals who volunteer, of course, they're getting that experience and boosting their confidence because they're getting an opportunity to show that they can do this really well, and get to see their successes.
Fresh ideas
Well something that can be difficult with volunteers is filling their time and that's something that often makes staff members a little bit apprehensive about having a volunteer with them.
So we find that if you find yourself at that stage, it often really helps to actually sit down with the volunteer and ask them about what their ideas are and what they've observed, and often they actually can see things that they can do and have come up with some really great ideas themselves but don't feel comfortable to share them or to direct their tasks. So that's something that often works.
Another one is to have a list of tasks up your sleeve that often your own staff members don't get time to do – so things like creating resources, or doing networking or calling around other organisations, resource mapping – those kind of timely tasks that paid staff members often don't get chances to do.
Supporting each other
It often helps to check for understanding when you are working with culturally diverse volunteers, especially if their English language isn't as strong. So something that can help is, if you explain a task that you would like a volunteer to do, finish off that conversation with a question like, 'So what are first three things you'll do to get that task done?', to make sure that you know they've got a start.
Something we find that it helps to pair volunteers with someone they know. That can increase their confidence and they've got someone to support them throughout the day.
Another thing we've found when we work with culturally diverse volunteers is to actually get them to keep a diary so each day they keep a record of the new tasks they've learned that day. And this is actually beneficial for the volunteer as well as the organisation because you can both look back and realise how valuable it has been to both of you to have the placement.
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Posted by Nelle - Monday, 21 November 2011 03:01