Kensington Neighbourhood House welcomes the community

English language students at Kensington Neighbourhood House (KNH) fashioned welcome signs in 17 different languages to display in the foyer as part of Cultural Diversity week in March.

KNH community development specialist, Esther Sadek, said the idea for the project originated with Hamida Abi, one of the students who is actively involved with the Kensington community.

“It’s a really lovely, personal way to represent the fact we welcome people from a range of backgrounds,” she said.

KNH has a student advisory body made up of diverse range of people who attend KNH programs, including seniors, childcare parents and English students.

Ms Sadek said the team was busy chatting about how to make the house a more welcoming place, when Ms Abi suggested creating welcome sign which quickly evolved into the idea of creating stickers showcasing a welcome message in different languages.

“So then in 2019 as part of our celebration for social inclusion week, we asked people to hand-write welcome signs in their own languages,” Ms Sadek said.

“The COVID-19 pandemic stalled our plans to continue to expand on this but in late 2020 during lockdown we invited KNH program participants, mostly from our adult English language classes, to hand-write welcome messages in their first languages on paper.”

The messages, now stuck on the walls of the foyer, coincided with Cultural Diversity Week in Victoria, which ran from March 21 to 28.

Ms Sadek said Cultural Diversity Week started with Harmony Day, which was chosen because it is the international day for the elimination of racial discrimination – an initiative launched by the United Nations to mark the Sharpeville massacre. 

It was on this day, March 21, 1960, that police in South Africa shot and killed 69 people at a peaceful protest against apartheid.

Ms Sadek said the welcome messages were written in many different languages, including Somali, Mandarin, Sinhalese, Vietnamese, Amharic, Portuguese, Thai, German, Indonesian, Persian, Tamil, Japanese, Cantonese, Kurdish, Hindi and Romanian.

KNH welcomes people from about 70 different countries through its doors each year.  

“At Kensington Neighbourhood House we are proud of our cultural diversity and it is a huge strength of the house that we have people coming from so many different countries,” Ms Sadek said •