Just like Swiss cheese, any information dissemination medium has holes. But, if you use enough pieces of cheese, or mediums, all the holes will be covered. Within the context of community engagement, applying a multilayered strategy ensures that any audiences that fall within the gap of one medium, are captured in another. When delivering information to Culturally and Linguistically diverse (CALD) communities, a multilayered Swiss cheese engagement approach becomes integral to cover the needs of a multitude of communities at the one time.
Preliminary insights on the 2021 Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS] Census show that 22.3% Australians speak a language other than English at home. These statistics would not be a surprise to anyone who has witnessed the growth of multicultural communities in Australia and waves of migration which has brought hundreds of languages and dialects to our shore.
Australia’s Largest Language Groups
The top 5 languages other than English spoken in Australia per the 2021 Census – Mandarin (2.7%), Arabic (1.4%), Vietnamese (1.3%), Cantonese (1.2%), and Punjabi (0.9%) - are continuing to trend steadily upwards. These language groups have come up as significant language groups in several consecutive censuses.
As the largest CALD communities in Australia, these groups have well established media outlets, community resources, and reach. There is a plethora of methods to engage with these communities to convey important messages and they can be targeted similarly.
New and Emerging Language Groups in Australia
What may come as a surprise are the new and emerging languages that the ABS Census highlights. These are language groups that are smaller in number, more recent in their arrival to Australia, and have a less established presence in the broader community. Some language groups that experienced an interesting wave of growth (represented as a percentage in the brackets) from 2016 statistics to the 2021 statistics are:
Oromo (+41.7%)
Uyghur (+ 59.7%)
Fijian Hindustani (+76%)
Tigrinya (+36%)
Amharic (+19.7%)
Kurdish (+59.6%)
Pashto (+37.1%), and
Hazaragi (+87.1%)
These statistics reflect the settlement patterns we have seen over the past four years – with Oromo, Tigrinya, Amharic hailing from East African migration, Kurdish from South-West Asian migration, and Pashto and Hazaragi from Afghan migration. Migration trends that with Australia’s relaxed post-COVID border restrictions we may continue to see increase.
However, these new settlement groups lack the established environment that allows for them to be captured in the same methods as the larger language groups. They have less of a collective presence in ethnic media, less representation in mainstream media, or less of a collective social media presence. Looking back to the Swiss cheese model, they fall within the gaps of traditional information dissemination models and require different methods of engagement.
Community Engagement as a Communication Model
In our practice, we advocate for in-language face-to-face engagement (where COVID-safe) to be woven into communication strategies to capture the needs of these new and emerging language groups. Importantly, we deliver these engagement sessions by partnering with trusted intermediaries or community groups which aids with information reliability. The facilitators are often familiar to the group members before the session and have established rapport with the participants which creates a forthcoming environment.
Recently, we have been able to partner with migrant and refugee groups to deliver in-language state government information to several smaller language groups. Our information sessions utilised in-language materials that were a combination of imagery and text to ensure that communities with lower literacy in their native languages were still able to receive information. These workshops were also an important forum to provide smaller language groups who may not have strong community advocates the opportunity to discuss their experience and ask their questions of stakeholders.
The feedback we receive from community members on our engagement is positive. It allows smaller language groups in Australia to feel catered to, and included, within important conversations that would otherwise leave them out. Particularly where sharing critical information – such as COVID-19 resources – these community engagement sessions become a crucial tool in ensuring consistent and reliable messaging dissemination.
Where to from here?
No one mode of engagement will reach all groups in a mass. Particularly when discussing a demographic as diverse as Australia. This is where the Swiss Cheese Model comes in handy to ensure that a multi-layered engagement model caters to diverse community needs. While face-to-face sessions may seem like a step back in what we have available to us in this technological age – without them we risk leaving many behind who may need this information the most. So, maybe the future of engagement models in our diverse multilingual country is in fact rooted in engagement humble beginnings – by hitting the ground with workshops, information sessions, and a physical presence.