A person wearing a bicycle helmet with a tree in the background.

Understanding the needs of multicultural communities (VOICE partnership)

It's difficult for multicultural communities to access the services and information they need. These communities face social and structural disadvantages and often need greater support. The Victorian Ongoing Initiative for Community Engagement (VOICE) aims to work with communities to understand their strengths, needs and challenges. We connect communities with public health and other technical experts.

VOICE is a Burnet-led partnership with the Centre for Multicultural Youth (CMY), Monash University Action Lab, the Islamic Museum of Australia, Your Community Health and the Australian Multicultural Foundation. It has been supported by funding from the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing.

Understanding needs and challenges

VOICE uses a combination of traditional and digital community engagement. We collaborate and partner with people in the community and working in the sector. We do this to make public health practice stronger for multicultural communities.

Our work includes:

talking with communities and service providers about current and upcoming public health needs
working together to solve problems during emergencies like floods, pandemics and fires
sharing best-practice information and methods
providing timely support, tools and advice based on evidence
developing a website (VOICEonline) designed with communities’ and service provider input.

Bringing services together

Community organisations told us that one of their greatest challenges is the disconnection between services. These challenges got worse during the pandemic. New public health strategies emerged quickly, but with limited funding. This made it harder to measure how effective these strategies were. VOICE was created to explore new ways of addressing public health challenges by:

using community strengths
sharing learnings
growing impact
amplifying unmet needs
co-designing responses to new community problems.

VOICE seeks a more sustainable and meaningful impact by supporting collaboration between communities, services providers and government.

Co-creating communications

We worked with Melbourne's Indian community to turn key messages from a community question time session into social media content that can be shared through their networks and promote vaccine awareness and uptake.

Multilingual posters explaining all COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.

Multilingual social media posters used to promote COVID-19 vaccines.

Community question time with Melbourne's Indian community

This video is an example of engaging a community through a community-led public health communications process. This process was developed by Burnet Institute and Today Design in partnership with Victoria's multicultural communities. It involves connecting communities directly to public health experts. This enables questions and concerns to be addressed in a person-centred, culturally sensitive and supportive environment.

We call this session 'Community question time'. In October 2021, Burnet Institute, Indian Care and Today Design partnered to co-create a series of key messages and social communications with members from north-west Melbourne's Indian Community.

We worked together to prioritise a list of key information needs. We then discussed who would be the trusted sources of information to help the community answer questions they were hearing in their social networks.

From this list, we recruited a panel to answer questions from the community. Answers were informed by public health and behavioural science to ensure community feedback was relevant and culturally appropriate.

Mental health advice for the Muslim community in Darebin

In these videos, 4 different professionals share advice on mental health. The videos are aimed at young people and their families in the Darebin Muslim community.

We created these videos in partnership with The Australian Multicultural Foundation, Your Community Health and The Islamic Museum of Australia.

Social worker Durre Shahwar gives parents tips on how to help their kids with their mental health and well-being.

Imam Sheikh Abdinur Weli talks about mental health and wellbeing from a religious point of view.

School counsellor Omer Yucel gives young people advice on the best ways to take care of their mental health and well-being.

Psychologist Ghada El-Zohbi explains how to get professional clinical support for mental health issues.

Pasifika young people

This is a short video about young people from the Pasifika community in Melbourne facing problems at schools. This video was co-created with Pasifika young people. It shows their struggles when teachers don't understand young people have other responsibilities outside of school.

The video came from 2 workshops led by Monash ActionLab with young Pasifika people in Melbourne's south-east.

During the first workshop:

young people talked about using media, like videos, to talk about their community's issues
they decided on the theme of the video.

A young person from the Centre of Multicultural Youth then created the video. Later, in the second workshop:

young people provided feedback
ActionLab provided feedback.

The young person creating the video then improved it to its final version.

Benefits to the community

VOICE offers multicultural communities a platform to be heard and listened to. It helps service providers understand and adapt to the needs of multicultural communities. Through workshops, surveys and initiatives like VOICE online, VOICE has strengthened relationships between communities, service providers, public health practitioners, policy makers and government.

Guides

Guide to developing community-led public health communications

This handbook aims to help service providers with creating community-led public health communications. It includes templates, guidance and examples around: how to research and identify community needs, hosting a community forum and developing and sharing health messages.
Burnet Institute Community Led Comms Handbook [PDF 1.2 MB]
Exploring mental health in communities: a facilitator guide

This guide shows 5 activities community workers can use. These activities can help understand and address a community’s feelings towards mental health. Some of the circumstances in which you might use this guide include if: you’ve noticed more clients reporting mental health concerns; you know the community you work with has struggled with issues around mental health, you know the community you work with holds an unaddressed stigma towards mental health, you’re developing a program or content around mental health. At the end of this guide, you’ll find worksheets and other resources you can use when running these workshops. We created and tested these resources with people from the community. You can edit, adapt or use these resources for inspiration.
Exploring mental health in communities: a facilitator guide [PDF 984.6 kB] Exploring mental health in communities: a facilitator guide [DOCX 8.5 MB] Exploring mental health in communities: facilitator presentation [PPTX 5.2 MB]

Reports

Voices from the pandemic: what we heard from service providers

In 2022, we talked with various stakeholders who worked with multicultural communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. We wanted to learn how the pandemic affected them and what the priority areas for action are. We learned that the pandemic was a constantly changing landscape, that finding different ways to connect with the community was necessary, that it's crucial to make services and support accessible and engaging, that understanding the impact of the pandemic is important and that deciding priorities to take the next steps is crucial.
Voices From The Pandemic What We Heard From Service Providers VOICE Partnership [PDF 742.0 kB]
Mental health conversations among South Sudanese young people in the south east of Melbourne

We aimed to understand the mental health and well-being needs of the South Sudanese community in southeast Melbourne after COVID-19.
Summary of mental health conversations among South Sudanese young people [PDF 351.7 kB] Full report: mental health conversations among South Sudanese young people [DOCX 58.4 kB]
Talanoa: COVID-19 pandemic and Pasifika young people

This report outlines current and emerging needs of Pasifika young people’s experiences during the pandemic. It includes information about the research methodology drawing on Pacific Indigenous knowledge, key themes emerging from conversations and perceptions and impacts of COVID-19 among Pasifika young people.
Talanoa COVID 19 Pandemic And Pasifika Young People VOICE Partnership [PDF 514.3 kB]

Pandemic recovery needs and priorities of Pasifika youth in south-east Melbourne

This report explains what we learned from a set of co-designed workshops with young people from the Pasifika community in southeast Melbourne. It includes the project design and approach, key findings from the workshops and recommendations for further engagement.
Rising From Resilience Pandemic Recovery Needs And Priorities Of Pasifika Youth In South East Melbourne VOICE Partnership [PDF 600.5 kB]
Darebin Muslim community survey 2022 results

This document summarises the results of a survey done with the Muslim community in Darebin, Victoria, at the end of 2022. It includes the demographics of survey participants and the impacts of the pandemic on survey participants.
Darebin Muslim community survey 2022 results [PDF 252.7 kB] Page 1 image of Darebin Muslim community survey 2022 results [JPG 260.2 kB] Page 2 image of Darebin Muslim community survey 2022 results [JPG 255.3 kB]