Building Relationships with the Community

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Building Relationships with the Community

• Pauline ChanMulticultural Services
  LibrarianParramatta City Council

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My Roles And Responsibilities

• establishing and developing community language
  resources (i.e. resources in different languages
  other than English) and literacy collections for
  the librarys six branches
• liaising with other teams to plan the marketing
  and promotion of library multicultural services,
  including networking with appropriate client
  groups and organisations.

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Multicultural Australia United in Diversity

• Governments commitment for Multicultural
  Australia
• The three main objectives for this policy are
• Community Harmony to provide an opportunity for
  Australians to acknowledge our success as a
  harmonious and diverse nation and promote
  harmony.
• Access and Equity to ensure that government
  services and programs provide for the diversity
  in Australian society enabling each person to
  participate fully in our multicultural society,
  realise their personal aspirations, and benefit
  Australia.
• Productive diversity to highlight the social,
  economic and cultural benefits of diversity.
• (Commonwealth of Australia Updating the 1999
  New Agenda for Multicultural Australia Strategic
  directions for 2003-2006)

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Snapshot of Parramatta City

• The Parramatta Local Government Area (LGA) is
  located at the head of the Parramatta River,
• 24 kilometers west of Sydney Central Business
  District (CBD).
• The LGA is 61 sq km in area
• The residential population of Parramatta LGA was
  148,323
• (Australian Bureau of Statistics Census 2006)

• (Parramatta City Council
• Annual Report 2005/06))

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Demographic profile of Parramatta Local
Government Area (LGA)
Total population in Parramatta LGA 148,323
(excluding overseas visitors)
In the 2006 Census at Parramatta LGA 19.1 of
the population were children aged between 0-14
years, and 21.5 were persons aged 55 years and
over.
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Demographic profile of Parramatta Local
Government Area (LGA)
In the 2006 Census, 40.3 of persons were born
overseas and 48.8 of
person spoke other languages at home.
The most common languages other than English
spoken at home were Arabic 10.7, Cantonese
5.0, Mandarin 4.7, Korean 2.1, Hindi 2.0,
Persian 1.6
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Challenges

• what sort of things Library could do to help
  people from CALD backgrounds to feel more welcome
  and involved in the community
• what sort of partnership Library could build up
  in responding to the needs of people of different
  age groups from CALD backgrounds.

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Community language collections holding
_at_Parramatta City Library

• Hindi
• Italian
• Korean
• Persian
• Turkish
• Vietnamese

• Arabic
• Chinese (Traditional script)
• Chinese
• (Simplified script)
• Greek

Basic English Collection
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Developing and maintaining the relationship with
service providers
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A successful active relationship

• based on mutual trust and respect
• allows for different views but finds areas of
  common agreement
• is transparent, with the constraints on each
  party clearly understood.
• pursues mutual benefits for all involved.

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Planning successful partnerships programs

• Set up a program committee to
• Identify the purpose of the program
• Set the goals of the program
• Determine an appropriate topic and content of the
  program
• Identify possible resources for getting speakers,
  facilitators or interpreters
• Determine time length of the program
• Decide the date and time which is appropriate to
  run the program
• Reserve the location for program and confirm the
  presenters as early as possible.

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Designing a poster

• What to include?
• Title of the program,
• content of the program,
• Speaker/s of the program,
• date, time, venue,
• contact person/s for enquiry
• logos of partnership organisations

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Effective publicity and promoting the program to
the targeted community

• distribute paper-based materials
• post through electronic media
• send out the press releases to the ethnic media
• promote by words of mouth

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Timing of publicity

• Publicize needs to be well enough in advance.

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Evaluation

• Here are the questions
• What could have been added to the program?
• What could have been better about the program? 
• What was successful about the program?
• Would you encourage others to come to a program
  like this next time?

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Top Six Topics Requested for the Health
Awareness Talk
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Analysis of the Gender and Age of Audience
attending the Health Awareness Talk
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Top Six Postcodes
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Useful Reference Books for promoting and
publicizing the programs

• Margaret Gee's Australian media guide November
  2006
• Melbourne, Vic. Information Australia,
• ISBN 978-1-7409-5131-9 \ 978174095131
• Ethnic communities reference book 2005 the most
  comprehensive directory for ethnic communities in
  NSW
• Sydney Ethnic Communities' Council of N.S.W.,
  2005.
• ISSN 1035-1094

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Be active creative.
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Thank You.