Over the past few years I’ve travelled throughout my state of New South Wales and met with towns of all shapes and sizes. Towns that can’t find employees to grow their businesses, towns that are struggling to keep their schools open due to a lack of enrolments, towns with ambitions to grow into vibrant and thriving communities.
I talk to Councils, employers and community groups about the opportunity to attract people from refugee backgrounds, who are living in cities in Australia, to build their region. It is easy to make the case that the skills, qualifications, resilience and entrepreneurial drive refugees bring with them, can be beneficial for their town.
Through these discussions a common theme emerges, an overwhelming interest in initiating an attraction strategy and a hunger for examples and ideas from other towns that have done it before.
I recently joined a group of refugees on a bus visit to Walla Walla, a small rural town in Southern NSW. I was with about 30 refugees from the Assyrian community considering relocating away from Sydney. The 5 hour trip gave me a chance to hear what it had been like for people to settle in a big city like Sydney.
I heard a sense of feeling ‘suspended’ in their new environment – eager to build a new life, but unable to move forward because of financial pressures, trouble finding work and few social connections.
Like Ramin*, his wife Deena and their 6 year old daughter who arrived in Australia after escaping the war in Iraq. They moved straight into a house in a suburb of western Sydney with a large Assyrian community, close to settlement supports, English classes and health care.
But now two years on, the benefits of this proximity to cultural community and initial supports have now been outweighed by the very high cost of housing, competition to find work and sense of social isolation from the broader Australian community. Ramin and his family are at a stage in their settlement journey where they are ready to consider what’s next. For them, a sense of belonging, meaningful work and a quality education for their daughter is of top priority.
So how can we best connect families like Ramin’s with the opportunities that regional and rural towns have to offer? And what steps can towns take to prepare themselves and build a welcoming and inclusive community, so that there is the best chance of success once people have relocated?
These questions are what spurred me on to apply for a Churchill Fellowship in the first place. They are at the heart of what I hope to discover during my visits to towns in Canada, USA, Germany, Norway and Sweden.
I hope you will come along with me on this journey through this website.
I want the City to Country Project to be a useful space to share insights and ideas which can inspire other towns, spark new ideas and generate awareness of the enormous potential that regional towns have to offer refugees.
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*Names have been changed