by Sahar Foladi
The unemployment rate has been hitting hard in the City of Greater Dandenong with younger people facing especially challenging times.
Award-winning not-for-profit social enterprise, Ability Works, in partnership with RMIT has recently launched a research paper to identify the best ways to reach different communities in the area as it has a high multicultural population with a range of barriers to employment.
Being culturally diverse comes with great advantages and its own challenges.
CEO of Ability Works Sue Boyce said the unemployment rate in Greater Dandenong was astronomically high, particularly among the migrant communities.
“There’s a lot of lack of trust between the migrant community and employers because of the very big differences, compared to the country they’ve come from the employment environment is very different,” Ms Boyce said.
As such, people born overseas, especially women, face great challenges to find employment.
Data from the City of Greater Dandenong shows that woman aged 25-44 years who have settled in Australia are less likely to be in a paid employment, while 57 per cent of men with Year 11 completion are employed. Those with limited fluency in English language are at the most affected with 31 per cent in paid work.
The organisation will move its office to Dandenong in hopes of understanding and tackling the issue of unemployment among young people, with 17 per cent of 20-24 year olds unemployed.
Ms Boyce said that figure could increase to 20 per cent.
“We are aware that in Dandenong there’s a very high unemployment among the people that we would normally employ,” Ms Boyce said.
She said the research conducted by RMIT would provide her with information that could inform the best way to cater for people with barriers and work to minimise those barriers.
“We need to know, for example, do we need to have a psychologist on staff because people come from family violence and traumatic backgrounds. We just need to understand exactly what we can do so that we can get people fully productive, Ms Boyce said.
Ability Works has 175 employees, the majority of which are from significantly disadvantaged backgrounds.
“City of Dandenong is very active, they’ve actually set up a game changer program, and they have a series of breakfast where they invite employers and organisations that can provide services to the people who are unemployed,” Ms Boyce said.
However, she thinks things would need to be done differently.
The City of Greater Dandenong has its own research about unemployment issues in the areas, however, Ability Works has extended that through its partnership with RMIT.
This research has also engaged with different organisations such as, Indian Care, Friends of Refugees and Afri-Aus Care to be on the advisory community for the research.
