By: Bernice Murphy, CEH Manager

2022 has been another busy and exciting year at CEH with lots of interesting discussions, new approaches and improvements to our ongoing work. We’ve said farewell to some staff and welcomed new ones, projects have started and finished, and we’ve variously worked from home, almost returned to the office, and found ourselves working from home again.

We enjoyed the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA) Conference in June, catching up with old friends and colleagues and making new connections. It was great to meet face-to-face after such a long break. Like all multicultural gatherings, it was noisy and colourful and full of joy. The launch of the Australian Multicultural Health Collaborative was a highlight and offers the sector an opportunity to advocate on issues important to us all and ensures the voice of people from refugee and migrant backgrounds are central to our efforts.

Our Health Translations team in partnership with the Department of Health and Salsa Digital successfully migrated all resources to a new contemporary platform that will support the work for years to come.

Our projects embraced partnerships with communities: we co-designed health messaging with African women in Collingwood, alcohol awareness events with young people in Fitzroy, and Long COVID campaigns with community communicators across 15 diverse cultures and languages.

Thanks to the 2447 people who participated in our capacity building eLearning, workshops and/or webinars.  Most workshops were delivered on-line.  Happily, we were also able to get out and connect with audiences in person around Melbourne, Swan Hill, Brisbane, and Sydney.

As we moved to a COVID normal environment, the Multicultural Health & Support Service (MHSS) team was able to do more education and training sessions around sexual and reproductive health in person. We shared our experience of how to engage communities in sensitive subjects and increased our partnerships and projects with service providers. We travelled across Melbourne and to regional Victoria. And in the last 6 months of 2022, we reached almost 500 people in our education and training sessions, 65% being community members, and 35% health and community workers.

We look forward to taking a short well deserved break and wish you and your loved ones a restful and joyful new year.

It’s been such fun let’s do it all again in 2023!