A new government funded organisation led by the Federation of Ethnic Communities Council Australia (FECCA) promises to be a national voice for Australia’s multicultural women on issues including family violence and workplace discrimination.
Emerging as one of five national alliances to assist the Federal Government to implement their Working for Women strategy, the Australian Multicultural Women’s Alliance (AMWA) aims to tackle systemic barriers to multicultural womens’ progress and provide lived-experience insights and advocacy to the government.
“We want to be known as the national voice for multicultural women in Australia, so women feel supported, heard and valued, and feel like there’s hope that we can get some change,” Malini Raj, Executive Director of AMWA, told Indian Link.
Founded in partnership with Media Diversity Australia and Settlement Services International, Malini Raj says she is keen for AMWA to go beyond symbolic representation.
“With a lot of these organisations, there’s a bit of skepticism – is this another one that’s not going to change anything for me?”, she says.
“I want this to be one where people will interact and consult with us because they know that their voice is going to be utilised for their benefit, and that we are going to make change. They’re not just wasting their time with us.”
She says the Federal Government’s support for AMWA so far has been promising.
“So far [the Government] have been very forthcoming in terms of giving us access to the Minister for Women and asking for our insights and collaboration – we’ve gotten the opportunities to be at those tables,” Raj says.
AMWA’s work will be organised around five key areas taken from the Working for Women strategy: Gender-Based Violence, Health, Paid and Unpaid Care, Economic Security and Leadership.
Malini Raj says they will take a holistic approach, embedding multicultural women’s interest across all portfolios and tackling everything from culturally appropriate healthcare to overseas skills recognition. Their approach will include collecting community stories, amplifying existing grassroots initiatives in these areas, and placing multicultural voices at mainstream tables.
“We need to interact with the whole ecosystem… it’s not about fixing the women. It’s about fixing the structures around them which preclude multicultural women from having that level playing field,” she says.
Launching just last week in Melbourne, Malini Raj says there’s still work to be done before they can begin to put forward advocacy points.
“It’s looking at what we can do,” Raj says. “We’ve done preliminary surveys, but now that we’ve launched, we’ll set up thematic working groups, which deep dive and build coalitions of all the organisations in that space, to help us with that collective advocacy, so we’re all singing from the same song sheet.”
She looks forward to engaging with the community and allowing their insights to guide them.
“My aim is to make sure everything is based on what we’re hearing from the community to make sure that it’s relevant,” Raj says.
“We always welcome feedback. We don’t want to do things how they’ve always been done…we want to constantly ask women, what can we do to support them?”
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