Diversity Forum 2010

Usha Chand, migrant and pacific peoples adviser attended New Zealand Diversity Forum on Sunday 22 -23 August 2010 held at Christchurch. The Forum covered issues around community living, education, youth and minority.

Some highlights were :

Getting to know staff from the community organisations and agencies working with migrants and refugees in South Island eg. Refugee Services Aotearoa, Settling In, Settlement Support, Human Rights Commission, Office of Ethnic Affairs, Christchurch Resettlement Services, Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce, Hagley Community College, Peeto Learning Centre, Shakti Ethnic Women’s Centre, Canterbury Refugee Council and NZ Police

- Hassan Ibrahim, Refugee Education Coordinator, Ministry of Education’s session on how NZ Curriculum framework supports refugee education. Some of the challenges for Muslim students and their families in NZ schools are: age of the students, different teaching system, number of students in a class, length of stay in NZ, teacher-student expectations, concept of respect, social integration with peers and peer pressure, exposure to historical drama. Accurate community mapping by schools and resulting strategies to help distinct student needs leads to successful outcomes for students and the school.

- Mia Northrop’s session on her Vindaloo against violence campaign. Mia, a social media expert from Melbourne, used Face book to mobilize 17,000 people across the world to show support for the Indian community to go dining at 400 local Indian restaurants on a given night. Media coverage of a spate of attacks against Indian students in Australia prompted her to do something that was effective yet did not require too much money, time or lots of people

-Graeme Innes, Australia’s Disability Discrimination and Race Discrimination Commissioner is a lawyer, mediator, and human rights campaigner for 30 years and was the first Chair of Vision Australia, Australia’s national blindness agency. He delivered his message of ‘united we stand, divided we fall’ (i.e. do not campaign against one another) through 3 stories: the year the blind got to vote via secret ballot in Australia, meeting and working with Sharon, a sex change gay and Keith, blind, competitive House captain in a school

-Hana O’Reagan, Member of the Maori Language Commission and Kairahi at CPIT, talked of how important it is to feel comfortable with who we are and identifying where we belong. As examples, she talked of how when she was growing up, different people’s perception of who she was differed from her perception of herself as a Maori. At primary school, she got called a ‘nigger’ whereas at a Maori Girls boarding school she was a ‘honki’

-youth group issues presentations called “little things matter.” The issues highlighted were education, diversity and importance of communication between communities.
http://www.slideshare.net/nzhumanrights