Shankar Kasynathan On Inclusive Communities That Create Thriving Neighbourhoods

Shankar Kasynathan’s earliest memories are of his family being resettled by a generous neighbourhood after finding refuge in Australia. Over the last 15 years he has been dedicated to building more inclusive and welcoming neighbourhoods, schools and workplaces.

Today, as an education consultant and community engagement expert, he is the driving force behind the My New Neighbour campaign. He has worked as a sessional academic at Deakin, Monash and Charles Darwin universities. He has developed community engagement & advocacy programs for Oxfam, Transparency International, the National Heart Foundation and Amnesty International.

He has been an adviser to local, state and territory governments as well as Members of Cabinet, about diversity & social inclusion strategies including most recently as commissioner for multicultural affairs in Victoria. Shankar has been invited to present at conferences in the UK, Ireland and Switzerland, and has worked extensively across Australia with aboriginal and refugee communities. He has just gone back to school to complete a Masters in Education. Based in Castlemaine, he lives and works on Dja Dja Wurrung country.

Shankar Speaks About his journey as an ADVOCATor across organisations, and how the ‘My New Neighbour’ campaign seeks to assist the integration of refugees into australian society through positive communication at the ground level.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Carlie Daly] - Could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work with Amnesty International?

[Shankar Kasynathan] - My family and I were privately sponsored as refugees from Sri Lanka back in 1987. My earliest memories of life actually relate to images and stories I have in my head of people that literally stepped into our world to help us. I have this image for example, of an old white gentleman trying to strap me into a seat belt when I was a four-year-old. And I think, you know, just as we've come to Australia and I was just screeching my head off trying to figure out what this seat belt thing is; but it was an act of love of someone trying to keep me safe. Walking into an empty house, our first home and still our home 30 years later. And it was completely empty and there were just random people bringing furniture and, and filling it with donations.

So in an important sense, I guess my earliest recollections are really reflective of that generosity of neighbourhoods, of goodness that exists at a local level right across this country. And that stayed with me growing up through schools going out and going to uni. And a couple of years ago I was offered the opportunity of joining Amnesty International as their refugee campaign coordinator. Before that I had had various stints of working with refugee communities in the Northern Territory, in Melbourne, in the ACT as an advisor, lots of multicultural affairs I was particularly passionate about, asylum seekers in a city like Canberra. I brought all that to my role with Amnesty and I was able to take on a new campaign then build it from scratch, the My New Neighbour campaign, which calls for reform to Australia's community refugee sponsorship scheme.

It was really quite ironic that those early memories and how my family came to Australia, brought here and resettled here by neighbourhoods that were very generous and welcoming, to linking it to a campaign that's calling for Australia to reform its own community sponsorship model.

So that we could also bring people here safely which is a model driven largely by generous communities and neighbourhoods like the scheme that works in Canada and the UK and New Zealand. The work I'm doing today is raising awareness and community sponsorship and asking for that model in Australia to be improved, so that it's more in line with international best practice. Getting support for that across the country. So that’s one big loop of where I'm at.

The My New Neighbour campaign, from what I've read has gained amazing traction and results in a short amount of time. Is that your experience or are you seeing it from a different lens?

Well as a campaigner, you always keep going till you actually win. We've certainly made progress along the way, but a win for us on the My New Neighbour campaign is for Australia to have its own community sponsorship model, that is generous, that is additional humanitarian intake, that is in line with international best practice and the leader in the region on our sponsorship.

I should probably share a little bit with your listeners about what exactly community sponsorship is. It's the ability for communities and neighbourhoods to be able to privately sponsor a refugee or refugee family that are waiting to be resettled and often it might be in refugee camps or waiting in a second country in limbo, who've been assessed by the UN as being refugees, who are then brought to Australia or assessed by the Australian government.

They are then brought to Australia by a nominating family or community groups, et cetera. And so, this is a program and a scheme that has worked in Canada for 40 years more than 300,000 refugees have been directly impacted by that scheme. It's taking off in the UK, it's taking off in Ireland, it's taking off in New Zealand and many other countries around the world. In Australia we have this scheme too which allows community organisations and groups to be able to bring people here. But the nature of this scheme in Australia is quite limited. Instead of the way it works in Canada in that you privately sponsor a refugee family and that's an addition to the Canadian humanitarian intake.

Here in Australia, the government has said if you ever privately sponsored a refugee that you and I might sponsor, we're taking away a place from the humanitarian intake in Australia. It’s really like robbing Paul to give to Steve. And then on top of that, the costs are extremely high. It's $50,000 for an individual and up to $100,000 for a family, which you can imagine is well and truly beyond the imagination of even our most generous neighbourhood organisations. And then the eligibility criteria is really quite tight as well. So, the My New Neighbour campaign since March 2018 has been calling for the improvement and overhaul of Australia's model. And on that journey we have gained the support of over 30,000 Australians who signed a petition calling for improvements in over 30 local governments across the country. That's metropolitan, regional, rural councils saying ‘yes, our neighbourhoods want a chance at this. And we would like for this program to be reformed.’ So, the Ministers have been getting letters from a range of Mayors, asking that community organisations, institutional groups, even AFL clubs have been getting behind the campaign, calling for the reform of this pathway.

It has shown a lot of promise, but as I stated, it's not over until we get what we're seeking, which we're hopeful that we will get there. The Australian Labour Party last year at its national conference announced that it would overhaul a community sponsorship program more in line with international best practice if it was elected to government. The Australian Greens followed a week later and also said that they would commit to overhauling this scheme. And just recently here in 2019 in December, Minister David Coleman committed his government to evaluate the scheme in 2020. So, there's all sorts of indications of hope and we will continue to advocate and I'm very grateful that the campaign which began with Amnesty International is soon to become a coalition campaign involving multiple organisations.

The campaign’s growing strong and the momentum is building and I'm very proud of the fact that one of the great things about this campaign is that it has begun to harness the interest and actively support refugee communities in Australia particularly, which is really important.

I can imagine from their perspective, a number of families and community members, desperate to reunite with family community overseas and who are stranded and waiting to be resettled. And in the absence of a functioning family reunion program in Australia, many people are going to significant debt to try and use this scheme to reunite with families through our sponsorship programs. So they are grateful that there's advocacy happening on this broken model at the moment. It's not just the people that we can bring here, it's people here who are very distressed about this scheme currently being broken. We're very proud of the fact that it's not just people who are standing as allies with refugees, but refugees themselves who are actively involved in this campaign.

Yeah, and I think that's so important. You've got to work with the people that are directly experiencing this. So in your experience with refugee communities, what are some of the opportunities in Australia that can ensure inclusiveness and support once we have resettled families here?

That's a really important question, Carlie. One of the things about community sponsorship which I'm really excited about is that when I think about my own journey and my family's journey in Australia, we had friends from day one when we landed in this place, and networks that were wrapping around us and giving us that really strong support to become active citizens and active members of that community from the get go. [It comes back to the] word integration. How do we bring our diversity and our richness of who we are and live alongside in a strong way with other members of our diverse community, without losing a sense of ourselves? And I think that that notion of just strong cohesiveness comes with something like community sponsorship.

That's true in a lot of the work that's been done today, right across the country. And I think community sponsorship has the potential to really formalise a lot of relationships and initiatives that are already on the ground and very active right across this country. They're from Coffs Harbour to Albury, Wodonga, even Armidale and in very conservative and progressive corners of this country. There are local groups that are saying, "look we've got a need and a desire to do tangible positive things that can help people step into our communities and feel like they're a part of it."

I think that the notion that we're looking for is doing stuff with refugees, not for them or at them.

It's that active sense of being able to create communities with our new neighbours and walking alongside us and giving them a sense of agency in that it's not saying, '“Oh look, you should be grateful that we've saved you or done this thing for you, but let's help each other build stronger and more resilient inclusive communities for the future.”

And I think that's what the potential is about community sponsorship. If we can just have a decent model in Australia I think that it's going to have a much bigger impact. And I think that's what we've seen in Canada is that for the 300,000 refugees that were directly impacted, we need to think about the 3 million Canadians that were actively involved in settling their new neighbours. And that's the figure that I think about and hopeful for Australia.

It's this learning opportunity for everyone too. It's not about, "Oh this is what we can do for you, you're so lucky." It's like, “well how can we work together and learn from each other because there is so much that we still don't know.” So around that, is there a language and a process that we should be using to engage stakeholders? You've got your My New Neighbour campaign, but what else can we do to, to see this positive social change? As Australian citizens, I think some people get a bit fearful of being offensive in some way.

Look, there's many ways to look at that question I suppose. And I think one thing that we think about on the campaign constantly, is reminding everybody that's engaging in media and social media that as much as the media or some parts of the media might want us to think that, no one in Australia wakes up wanting to be cruel, actively cruel to refugees with maybe one or two exceptions. But no one by and large wants to be nasty.

There's a bit of a communications breakdown in this country and I think that we need to address that breakdown. And the part of that is looking at the stories and focusing on the stories of resettlement, focusing on the stories of how people are being supported, focusing on the stories of tangible initiatives that are taking place, every single day right across this country, which support successful resettlement of refugees.

That is a big focus for us. How do we make sure that we get the stories of tangible active solutions out there? So, we've been doing a lot of work on that now and not often do tangible positive stories get media attraction in the way that crisis stories do.

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I think that's the responsibility that we have is to keep pushing the good news, is keep pushing the positive things that are happening so that people can get that sense of "Oh this is something I can do to help this situation."

Not often do I get invited to speak about the work that I'm doing. And I try to talk about the fact that yes, we've got this massive global humanitarian crisis with refugees right across the world, but here's a local solution to that and something that could work and it's based on evidence.

It's based on demonstrated performance elsewhere and there's goodness in Australia to back it up as well. So it's about reframing the conversation and seeing people as neighbours wanting to build community and not as us and them or someone from a third world or being able to create those divisions in the head, which sometimes makes the problem much bigger than it is. [It can make us think it’s] beyond our reach and our scope when actually we're talking about our neighbours or our potential future; pathways to make them come and join us in our neighbourhoods. So the language that we think about is very much about ‘how do we humanise the people that we're talking about here and how do we make it link back to everyday things that make us tick in Australia?’ I've spent a lot of time on the road with the campaign and there's one thing that is common right across this country in it is that we would do anything for our neighbours. And, and I think that's that sort of spirit which was underpinning the My New Neighbour campaign.

It's human to human connection and it's reframing the conversation; that is what we need to do.

You're speaking at Newkind Conference this coming January in Marion Bay, Tasmania… what are you most excited about for this?

I think when you're on the campaign trail, you can get really lost in your own theory of change and the work that's happening and you become really passionate and wedded to it.

I think that one of the things that conferences like Newkind offer is the insight and the ability to hear what other people are doing in the methods and their ways of going about doing it. That's been pretty cool, pretty critical for me; constantly learning and checking yourself on the campaign trail and going, "Hey, what else could I be doing better? Am I using the right language? Could I be doing more testing?"

That sort of indication that we need to be able to offer ourselves, I think is really, really important around listening to other peers and also just being able to connect with people and test new ideas against an audience as well to see how they resonate with it.

For me, conferences have certainly been useful in that way. And I'm certainly looking forward to going back a second time to the Newkind Conference and being able to look at what else other people are doing, but also share the kind of work that I've been doing and try and get some immediate feedback from the people that see my workshop.

Yes, feedback and the energy. It's so nice to be around social changemakers. I feel like you come back with a renewed sense of like, ‘yes I am doing the right thing, this feels good.’

Which social enterprises do you believe are doing a great job at tackling social, cultural and environmental problems?

So the kind of social enterprises that come to my mind are the ones that bring people along the journey from a different range of perspectives. I live here in Castlemaine, in Central Victoria and down the road in Bendigo is an initiative called the African Food Safari that's supported by the local ethnic community council. Bendigo [has] a lot of capacity of multicultural services. And their African Food Safari project, which they're supporting is an initiative of a local African women who have created a catering business, which is focused on serving the immediate community. And it's an initiative, which basically connects a thing that we all love, food, with their culture and history and story as an emerging community in Central Victoria to the broader growing diverse story of Bendigo. And it's just something really tangible where people can come together over food.

It's something that everyone does; food catering or providing food for events. And here they've made group of women doing this initiative, which addresses the need for them, employment and time, which fosters a strong community connection.

I've seen that same kind of initiative happen as well in a place called CERES in Melbourne. Tamil Feasts is another social enterprise which supports recently settled asylum seekers, through food and culture, and that group of Tamil men currently seeking asylum in Australia. And again, it's making something that we've always enjoyed across culture, coming together and eating food and connecting it to a social issue or a challenge and making everyone feel a part of it. It's that sense of being able to, in a nonthreatening way, insert questions and conversation about some common challenges in the community through something that's fun and enjoyable, such as dinnertime.

Food is community building! You see it all around the world; people come together and share meals on the street and it's an instant community builder in a nonthreatening way.

That's right, and we were talking about communication and engagement before.

It is being able to look at the positive framing, look at the solutions, look at the tangible things that we can do in the face of frustration all around us sometimes. What's really concrete about these ideas is that you can touch it and feel it and you can hear it, you can smell it, you can taste it. And it's all of us doing it together when we come together for the African Food Safari or Tamil Feasts in Melbourne.

And I'm sure there's many, many other initiatives like this, but when you think about social enterprise, that's what comes to mind. It's something that people quickly understand, stays with them and hopefully they learn something from it that they take forward.

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To finish off, we would love to know what books or resources you might recommend to our listeners?

There's a couple of books that come to mind for me and I really do also value podcasts like yours. The two books that come to mind for me… one is a novel by Julian Barnes and it's called The Sense of an Ending and the reason I'm nominating that book here today is because this book by Julian Barnes looks at how over time, over the course of our lives, we look back at things differently. We realise that how we're understanding things and perceiving things and reacting to things, today as we mature and experience life we may well change later on and have different perspectives.

And I think that when I talk to many people and engage with many communities across Australia that even the very sort of experience of community sponsorship has just changed people completely in terms of what they saw first and then how they've seen things differently. What we sometimes forget is just looking through the story in the life of the protagonist and you get to really journey through ‘wow, how, confronting is it to know that we thought we knew it all and then actually didn't and actually how far off we were.’

It's not just as a campaigner going in enlightening communities, but as a campaigner being enlightened about what I thought was really, really important and how to get the job done and then learning a lot more about the communities that I was working in.

And that I think is something that's really been driven home. A good example of that for me is when you start out a refugee campaign or activist you look at a place like Queensland. [I might be] generalising now, but I was a bit frightened of Queensland, going out there and campaigning and I had a lot of friends warning me and cautioning me. But you know, I went there and sat down with people and realised that regional Queenslanders and people had all very legitimate concerns and questions that we just needed to engage. And so what Julian Barnes, does in this The Sense of an Ending for me, is just that reminder of…

life is a maturing process and we need to reserve judgment and we need to really be cautious about passing judgment until we get insights and experiences of the other side and what people are saying,

I think that's very, very important to advocates and social change makers is listening and listening and listening and knowing that maybe we haven't got the whole picture. The second book that I would recommend to our community is The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris. Again, it's a little different to maybe books that you've had recommended, but the work I do is pretty intense as a person with lived experience and from a refugee background. I take my work very seriously and there's sometimes no switch off button and it's largely because you don't feel like you're really winning till you're actually bringing people safely to Australia and, changing policy and all that stuff. And what Dr. Russ Harris does in this book the Happiness Trap is that he really looks at getting us to lose that sense of perfection. The notion that we're chasing something that is going to make us happier, that we actually should be more comfortable with a whole bunch of range of emotions and feelings that are normal.

Chasing after that green hill is perhaps more destructive to us than we realise. The message there for me, is we really need to look after ourselves on the campaign trail. We need to look after ourselves when we actively seek to do the work we're doing because we need to first be healthy so that we can help others and do this work.

I know there's a lot of die-hard campaigners out there, myself included, that sometimes think we're just busting our guts out, and that's just what we need to do. But we have an impact on others that are working with us as well and we need to look out for how we are in the context of other people around us, and the people that come to daily contact with us as well. So yeah, look after yourselves and that's The Happiness Trap.

Thank you Shankar! If you're interested in coming to Newkind Conference, we have a special coupon code ‘ImpactBoom’ for our listeners. Use the code for 20% off tickets.