Events were held in the LGAs of Hornsby, Nowra, Ku-ring-gai, Ryde, North Sydney, Hawkesbury, Blue Mountains and City of Sydney. These were an opportunity for the community to meet ALNSW Coordinators – their local “Linkers”.

Linkers work closely with people with disability, their families and carers to support them to fulfil their goals, hopes and dreams: this includes participation in sport, education, volunteering, or other activities in the community.

SSI CEO Violet Roumeliotis said Linkers have strong local knowledge and work alongside communities, supporting them to be welcoming and inclusive.

“Linkers have been recruited to work with people and communities, including those from diverse backgrounds. Some SSI Linkers are bilingual, so the benefit of Ability Links NSW is that people of all backgrounds can feel supported to achieve their goals.”

Living Life My Way Champion Tish Peiris shared her experiences of life before and after disability at the North Sydney community event. Ms Peiris is a journalist and filmmaker and is a passionate supporter of ALNSW and the human rights of people with disability.

Member for Goulburn the Hon. Pru Goward participated in her local event by cutting an ALNSW cake and talking to attendees. Other events involved live music, quizzes, special guest speakers, and sharing of ALNSW participant stories.

ALNSW is for people with disability aged 9 to 64 years and their families and carers. Individuals, clubs, groups and businesses can also access ALNSW for information and support on inclusion of people with a disability.

SSI, in partnership with UnitingCare and the St Vincent De Paul delivers ALNSW to over 60 LGAs.

To find out more about ALNSW or who your local linker is, call (02) 8977 6700 or email abilitylinks@ssi.org.au

Or visit SSI’s ALNSW webpage: Ability Links NSW.

To communicate in another language call the Translating and Interpreting (TIS) service on 131 450.

Ms Roumeliotis said she was proud to be named among the other respected not-for-profit workers on the Impact 25, especially World Vision Australia Chief Executive Tim Costello who topped the list.

“This is wonderful news and I am very happy to accept this acknowledgement as recognition of the all the hard work SSI staff has put in this year,” Ms Roumeliotis said. “We have undergone some significant growth and change at SSI and I am proud of how we have remained focused on providing quality support and services for the people who rely on us. Congratulations to everyone on the Impact 25 list.”

Ms Roumeliotis has led SSI through a year or growth and change, while always advocating for the rights and welfare of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. In 2014 SSI secured new contracts to continue work supporting asylum seekers in NSW, and to expand in to disability services through the Ability Links NSW program.

SSI also established with seed funding Multicultural Youth NSW to advocate for young people; expanded its Ignite Small Business Start-ups initiative – supporting refugees to start their own enterprises; provided daily case work support and services to more than 8,000 asylum seekers and people from refugee backgrounds, and continued to expand its Multicultural Foster Care Service.

All this, and much more, was achieved in a challenging political and social environment, characterised by an escalation in anxiety about people seeking asylum and policy changes.

Pro Bono Australia News Editor Lina Caneva said the list of influencers included CEOs from major charities, tireless advocates, fundraisers and campaigners.

“Some of these people may not make headline news every day but it is clear they are having a significant impact in the communities in which they work and lead,” Caneva said.

“It’s been a transformative year in the not for profit community and these people of influence, as chosen by the sector, show how broad and complex the work that they do is.

“While a number of past and present political leaders including former Prime Minister Julia Gillard and current Federal Minister for Social Services Kevin Andrews were nominated in the list of influencers, they failed to make the final Impact 25 list.”

Pro Bono Australia founder and CEO Karen Mahlab said: “The business world regularly profiles its most influential people via awards and rankings and this is the first time we can highlight the social economy and the amazing work done by the leaders in it.

SSI CEO Violet Roumeliotis thanked the Hillsong members for their on-going support in 2014.

“We all make a special effort to be generous at this time of year but Hillsong Church members have been generous towards SSI’s clients all year,” Ms Roumeliotis said. “The church has supported SSI’s Community Kitchen on a number of occasions with donations of food and household items for people who struggle financially to meet their basic needs.

“Most of the people seeking asylum, who SSI support, do not have visas to work in Australia and live on about $32 a day. These donations of food will help families share a meal together, as many other Australian families will. And the gifts will surely put some smiles on the faces of about 100 children and teenagers. SSI thanks Hillsong members for their continued generosity.”

Jason Allen, a spokesman for the church, said Hillsong members felt a responsibility to help people seeking asylum in Australia.

“Any time that we see people in need in our own backyard, regardless of how they got here, we have an obligation to help them,” he said.

Mr Allen said it looked as though Hillsong members and their networks of friends had donated significantly more this year than the more than 80,000 items of food and toys that were distributed across 89 different organisations in 2013.

“Having people living below the poverty line in Australia just doesn’t seem right,” he said. “We encourage people at our services to be generous and I’m just blown away by how generous they are.”

If you would like to contribute to SSI’s support services for asylum seekers and refugees, you can:

Twelve clients took the hour-long bus trip with staff, then went bushwalking to the east-rim lookout to view the falls and on to the west-rim lookout to view the gullies. A National Parks ranger was on hand to provide information about the local fauna and flora.

Food for a barbecue lunch was kindly donated by Campbelltown businesses, El Sadik Supermarket Grocers and Campbelltown Meatex, and drinks were provided by McDonald’s Woodbine.

“Clients really enjoyed the day,” SSI case manager Lisa Keith said. “They appreciated the interaction with each other, making friendships with people from other cultural backgrounds. And it allowed case managers to engage in conversations and with clients – about their journeys, their families – and also laugh together.”

“We are now in the planning stages of a beach fishing trip and a day with the North Wollongong Surf Life Savers,” she added.

December 4, 2014

This is because they are less likely than Australians to have had swimming lessons.

To assist in the reversal of these statistics, Settlement Services International (SSI) has worked together with Royal Life Saving Society Australia (RLSS) to translate the Society’s water safety factsheets into the languages of migrant communities.

The RLSS ‘Water Smart’ factsheets can now be viewed and downloaded in the primary languages of SSI’s refugee and asylum seeker clients – Arabic, Dari, Farsi and Tamil – as well as English, from our publications page.

SSI hopes that these factsheets will help reduce the risk of drowning by emphasising that being around water, even small bodies of water in baths and buckets, can be dangerous. This is especially the case for children in Australia aged one to three, for whom drowning is the leading cause of injury-related death, according to the WHO report.

*WHO’s first Global report on drowning: preventing a leading killer

^† Source: 2011 figures, cited in WHO Mortality Database as of 30 April 2014.

December 3, 2014

“While being at SSI, I’ve learned that while youth face many great challenges, they also create positive outcomes out of those challenges. We have three great stories tonight from young people about how they work through those issues and how they understand them from their perspective.”

The opening speaker was Asif, an asylum seeker from Afghanistan, who talked about the struggle he and others like him went through trying to find a safe place to live. Asif also spoke about the skills and experience of people seeking asylum and how he thought asylum seekers could contribute to Australian society.

Sarah Yahya, 19, came to Australia with her mother and sister in 2007 as a refugee from Iraq. She spoke about the personal difficulties she battled to settle in Australia. Sarah told of the crisis of self she experienced after learning why her family had to flee Iraq. She talked about the bullying by fellow students and the confusion and anxiety of starting school in a country where the language was foreign, and of the depression she dealt with.

Bashir Yousufi, who finished his HSC that week, explained how he paid a man he had never met before about AU$2 to lead him from Afghanistan to the Pakistan border when he was 13 years old. From Pakistan, he journeyed to Australia with a group of young men and teenagers, he said, despite never having heard of the country before.

The speakers then joined a panel with SSI Case Manager Marcela Hart and Youth Projects Coordinator, Multicultural Youth NSW, Ryan Buesnel, and took questions from the audience.

Ignite Small Business Start-Ups was the SSI program shortlisted by the Macquarie Group Foundation for addressing an unmet community need and demonstrating SSI’s lateral thinking about community issues.

Other finalists included The Smith Family, The Centre for Eye Research Australia, and the Australian Centre for Social Innovation.

The foundation was awarded $100,000 to fund further development of its Fogarty EDvance initiative, which provides principals in low socio-economic status schools with leadership and management skills.

Chair of the Macquarie Group Foundation Shemara Wikramanayake, said the high calibre of submissions received this year made judging difficult. “I congratulate all our outstanding finalists for their commitment to continuing to develop innovative programs that address social needs and long-term community problems.”

SSI congratulates the Fogarty Foundation, and is proud to have been a finalist for this award.

The Walk Together event took place in cities and regional centres around the country and in Sydney participants enjoyed a glorious Saturday afternoon together. SSI was a proud partner of Walk Together and its organiser, the Welcome to Australia organisation. The event was based on principles and ideals that are foundations of SSI: that we are all common people, with common dreams, who have the right to live free of prejudice, persecution and harassment because of race, colour or religion.

With so much public attention on refugees and asylum seekers being negative, Walk Together was an opportunity for the public to reject these portrayals and to reiterate humanitarian values. Thousands of people carried signs that read “If we are people, we are equal”, and “you are welcome here”.

In Sydney we saw bipartisan support for the cause at federal level, with Liberal MP for Reid Craig Laundy joined by Labor MP for Greenway Michelle Rowland, Labor MP for Blaxland Jason Clare and Greens Senator and Leader Christine Milne. These politicians marched up front of the demonstration with lawyer and media commentator Mariam Veiszadeh, TV presenter Andrew O’Keefe and Welcome to Australia National Director Brad Chilcott.

SSI is an organisation established to support the needs of refugees, migrants and people seeking asylum, so staff, volunteers and clients were especially heartened to see the explicit support for these groups of often-marginalised people.

Australia is a nation built on immigration and which has had a proud history of providing safe asylum to refugees. In June this year Australia marked the 60th Anniversary of its Liberal Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies signing the nation’s support for the United Nations Refugee Convention. Australia was the sixth country to sign the convention, with six being the quota required to ratify the treaty.
World War II migrants and refugees were the focus of the convention but Australia has continued its support for refugees until today. The nation would barely be recognisable without these arrivals to its shores. Many prominent Australians who have contributed to the nation’s prosperity have done so because Australia welcomed them here as refugees.

While refugees and new migrants have always faced some discrimination in the community, there is growing cause to say negative sentiments have not been so prevalent since the signing of the convention. But Walk Together was evidence that there is a large sector of the community that wants to welcome refugees, migrants and asylum seekers as equals.

Through these visible shows of support, I have no doubt that we can again influence the public discourse to encourage an atmosphere of welcome in Australia.

Everyone at SSI would like to thank those who walked, and especially those other partner organisations – Welcome to Australia, AMES, Diversitat, MDA, Amnesty International Australia, MCCGC, and Cultural Diversity Queensland – that made the day possible.

SSI CEO

Violet Roumeliotis

Indian and Sri Lankan communities in NSW are said to have one of the lowest rates of breast cancer screening in the state, which can increase chances of survival through early detection. SAHELI supports the initiative by facilitating a mobile breast screening clinic that is free to women 40 years and older.

SAHELI operates under the Social Entrepreneurial Ventures of Australian South Asians organisation, known as SEVA International. The group of volunteers works closely with SSI, promoting health information, sponsoring SSI’s Community Kitchen and supporting social and cultural events, including Diwali celebrations, for SSI’s clients of South Asian heritage. 

The Fellowship is named after Rotary founder Paul Harris and is awarded “to recognise people who exemplify the Rotary spirit of ‘Service Above Self’ ”.  David was presented with the Fellowship after giving a talk to Rotary Club of Randwick members about his experience as a mental health first aid instructor.

David told the club that he dedicated himself to becoming a mental health first aider after a family experience with mental illness. As a social worker, he said, he had some basic knowledge of mental health but as a family member struggled to cope with bipolar disorder he found himself out of his depth.

He undertook studies on the subject, he said, and was able to help his family member on her journey of recovery.  A Rotary statement said David was recognised for his on-going work as an instructor in mental health first aid as well as for his professional work with SSI and his role as a board member of Nepean Youth Accommodation Service.

The Rotary Club runs Mental Health First Aid courses that it says gives ordinary members of the community the tools and confidence to listen non-judgementally and encourage loved ones to access the right professional help. Information and registration details for the course are available here.