Green Corner

5/12/2012

Bilingual Environmental Educator Mariette Mikhael, in collaboration with the Pakistani Australian Women Association (PAWA)and St George Migrant Resource Centre, have set up a wonderful initiative called ‘Green Corner’ from the Step Together Project. What is Green Corner all about? Mariette shares her experience with us...

Step Together is a pilot program which aims to increase the capacity of organisations that work with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities to integrate sustainable living actions into their current activities. Through this program I have been mentoring Rana from PAWA and Danma from Relationships Australia.

One of the main objectives of Step Together working with PAWA is to establish an environmental information stand or ‘Green Corner’ where various forms of environmental information will be made available to CALD communities.

St. George Migrant Resource Centre in Rockdale seemed to be an ideal place to install a stand to display educational materials due to the high traffic of CALD community people throughout the centre. However, our biggest barrier was the lack of space available to accommodate Green Corner.

Looking for the right venue, I arranged a meeting with Rockdale City Library where I luckily met two enthusiastic library officers Stephanie and Natalie. Both were very positive and supportive of the idea to set up an information stand, and the Rockdale City Library kindly offered a space. Natalie and I chose a stand to display useful information on various environmental topics and she helped make a banner for the stand which we have proudly named ‘Green Corner’.

It was one of those stand-out moments where I learned how crucial it is to collaborate with many partners, such as community organisations, agencies and councils. This collaboration has created a strong partnership and developed good working relationship between Rockdale City Library, Pakistani Australian Women Association and the Ethnic Communities’ Council of NSW. With the three parties working together in collaboration we were able to achieve great success – access to environmental information specifically addressing the needs of the Rockdale CALD communities! This has created an opportunity for all communities to take steps together toward a more sustainable future.

By Arabic Environmental Educator Mariette Mikhael