Enhancing Digital Participation Workshop
As technology continues to provide greater opportunities for us to work, learn and connect it’s important we make sure no one is left behind. As part of the Enhancing Digital Participation for Refugee and Migrant Youth project we collaborated with Deakin University and the Centre for Multicultural Youth to support three young people in Victoria - Sobur Dhieu, Peter Savat and Navjot Kaur – in their project ‘Youth Employment for a Digital Future’.
The youth-led team was aware of our research finding that it’s easier for larger organisations to attract funding than smaller organisations. Smaller organisations also have a lack of opportunities to network and engage in conversations around young multicultural people’s digital participation needs in relation to employment. To break barriers like this down they led the design and delivery of a community-based workshop with a focus on practical ideas to enhance digital participation for refugee and migrant background youth.
They successfully hosted an in-person event with nine participants from both grassroots and larger scale youth-facing organisations in Melbourne including Girl Chat, the African Youth Initiative, Next Gen Unite and Headspace. The event attendees networked and spoke about the barriers and opportunities young people from refugee and migrant backgrounds experience. During the event participants developed a cross-organisational proposal for a small grant that has the potential to result in a four-week digital employment skills program for refugee and migrant young people.
We are proud to witness what these three young people have achieved within their project which included workshop design, stakeholder management and co-facilitation. Their focus on actionable pitches and encouragement for attendees to create grant applications is a brilliant and creative implementation of important research findings. We’d also like to thank VicHealth for funding this project through its Impact Research Grants initiative.
This work is part of a greater body of work called the Enhancing Digital Participation for Refugee and Migrant Youth project, read about it here >
