Empowering refugee community leaders from emerging communities; ASeTTS Community Leadership Development Project

Rebuilding social capital and strengthening the capacity of refugee community leaders is the key to the recovery of members of collective communities. Collective communities often recover from trauma as groups or as a whole... [ view full abstract ]

Rebuilding social capital and strengthening the capacity of refugee community leaders is the key to the recovery of members of collective communities. Collective communities often recover from trauma as groups or as a whole community. Most of the clients that ASeTTS works with are members of collective communities who arrived in Australia from various countries. Some refugee communities have strong leaders but do not have second level leadership. With some others there are members who would like to become leaders but have less confidence due to lack of skills in running community projects/associations. ASeTTS community development team often receives requests from community groups to assist them to write grant applications, register their associations, design community projects or connect them with funding organisations and local government authorities.
As a result, ASeTTS decided to design a project to assist community leaders to build on their skills in managing and leading community groups. The project was inaugurated in 2015 as a pilot project. It is a six month free course offered by ASeTTS with the support of experts from various organisations including ASeTTS who volunteered their time as workshop facilitators. The course covered 4 main modules namely, leadership, community project designing, community association management and non-violent conflict resolution. The course included 11 fortnightly workshops held on Saturdays and one cross-cultural event organised by project participants to improve connections. For the completion of the project, ASeTTS organised a networking meeting along with the graduation ceremony with project participants and funding organisations for them to build direct connections. With the success of the group run in 2015, ASeTTS decided to facilitate another group in 2016 with a new group of leaders which was completed in August 2016. To date, ASeTTS has trained 39 community leaders originally from 16 different countries.