On Christmas Eve 2020 Chris Renwick, Centre for Refugee Employment, Advocacy, Training and Education (CREATE) mentor, received a call from his mentee Eva Madana, with some news.
‘It’s incredible, it’s a miracle,’ she shared excitedly. ‘Six months ago I could not get a job and had $23 in my bank account. Now I have three jobs and I’m on track to buy a house by next June, and it is all thanks to you and CREATE.’
Chris had mentored Eva as part of Deakin's Centre for Refugee Employment, Advocacy, Training and Education (CREATE) Careers Clinic. The clinic is an eight-week program in which people from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds are teamed up with a mentor who supports them in their job search.
CREATE, established in 2019 by Professor Alex Newman and Dr Karen Dunwoodie, leads research to create practical solutions to help people from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds to gain access into the workforce, or access vocational and higher education.
Deakin CREATE is the only research centre of its kind that focuses on the topics of refugee education and employment.
Dr Karen Dunwoodie
Director, CREATE
The CREATE Careers Clinics were developed with this in mind – to help people from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds re-establish their livelihoods and make stronger contributions to their wider community. The Helen Macpherson Smith Trust saw the potential of the program and donated $199,780 to fund clinics in Victoria for three years, starting in 2020.
‘People from refugee and asylum-seeker backgrounds often find it difficult to re-establish their career in Australia. There are organisations that are focusing on ‘survivor jobs’, which address employment, but we have thousands of people who are highly qualified and under-employed. We have doctors driving Ubers, engineers working in security. There is nothing wrong with those jobs, but it can be unfulfilling and detrimental to wellbeing for somebody if they can’t use their qualification and it would be a great benefit to Australia if they were working in their areas of expertise,’ says Dr Luke Macaulay, Research Fellow at Deakin Business School and the coordinator of the Careers Clinics.
‘Each Careers Clinic consists of a one-hour weekly group session where people from a refugee background are teamed up with mentors from a variety of industries. Together they work through a series of steps from job searches and interview techniques, to developing resumes and LinkedIn profiles.’
‘The mentors are volunteers who have found out about the clinics through our networks. The joke in the office is that I’m in the wrong industry. I should be a matchmaker because I agonise over the pairing of mentees and mentors. It is important that they can build a strong relationship to get the work done in a relatively short amount of time.’
‘I think I succeeded partnering Chris and Eva. Despite the age difference and disparate backgrounds, they were the perfect match. Both had enormous drive and energy and motivated each other,’ Dr Macaulay says.
Twenty-seven-year-old Chris Renwick grew up in Melbourne and completed a Bachelor of Commerce (Information Systems) and a Bachelor of Arts (Chinese) at Deakin.
‘Thanks to Centre for Refugee Employment, Advocacy, Training and Education and Chris I was able to get three jobs during the COVID pandemic when many people were losing their jobs’.
Dr Eva Madana
Eva Madana grew up in the Middle East, is married and has a 12 year-old daughter. She has a Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine and a Master of Physiology, and was working as an associate professor at a university overseeing a group of academics before coming to Australia in 2014 to undertake a PhD in nanomedicine at Deakin.
‘My husband had worked with Australian forces back in our home country and that caused us to be exposed to a real threat. In 2015, the situation had become more dangerous and that’s why we decided to seek asylum in Australia.’
‘The time after I finished my PhD and before I received permanent residency last December was very difficult. We did not qualify for support and my husband was unable to work as a result of his experiences back home. I needed to provide for my family. I started applying for all sorts of jobs but despite my experience and an Australian qualification I had no success. I had applied for over 100 jobs and was losing hope when I was directed to the CREATE Careers Clinic,’ Dr Madana says.
‘When I started, I was very frustrated, tired and unfocused. My accommodation was temporary and did not have an internet connection. Chris was incredibly supportive. When he learned about my lack of internet access, he sent me a SIM card, making it possible for me to connect to the Careers Clinic from home.’
‘Thanks to CREATE and Chris I was able to get three jobs during the COVID pandemic when many people were losing their jobs’. ‘I found work as a translator, a student support officer with a migrant resource centre in Geelong, and as an NDIS national community connector. Now that I have my foot in the door, I am working hard to prove myself and show my abilities,’ Dr Madana says.
The Careers Clinics are based on the innovative research that CREATE has undertaken to understand how best to support people from a refugee background re-establish their careers and access training. The centre has also developed a number of evidence-based guides aimed at employers to educate them on the benefits of hiring people from a refugee background, help people from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds looking to access higher education in Australia; and advise higher education institutions on how to best support such individuals.
‘The Careers Clinics have been a huge success, even with the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic. Sixty-eight of the 114 participants who fully completed the clinics in 2020 have found jobs or gained access to education within three months of completion,’ Dr Macaulay says.
Many of the centre’s projects are only possible through philanthropic support. As well as the generous support from the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust for the Career Clinics, the Bennelong Foundation has given $30,000 for the development of the Higher Education Student Guide. This guide provides essential information and advice for prospective students on how to gain entry to education, how to find the best pathways, select the right course and navigate the complexities of the application process. It also offers guidance on how to find and apply for scholarships and where to seek further support and information. To date, an average of 200 to 300 people and organisations have accessed the guide online every month. The guide has been shared with the Higher Education Centre at the UNHCR and across all tertiary institutions in Australia, as well as a number of universities in the US, NZ, Germany and the UK.
Interested in finding out more?
The scale of the challenge is enormous – there are at least 150,000 working age people from a refugee background in Australia. The work that CREATE is leading has already helped many of these people and has the potential to help many more. .