A Taste of Harmony Lunch

Our  annual ‘A Taste of Harmony’ lunch was held at Bennelong House on the  21st of March. This year we adopted a storytelling approach to share  with the group stories from young Australian’s from culturally and  linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds. Four speakers were engaged  through a social enterprise speaker’s bureau run by the Centre for  Multicultural Youth called ‘Shout Out’. The platform trains young people  from CALD and refugee background on public speaking and storytelling.   Staff were split up into small groups and moved around the building to  hear three out of the four speakers share their story.

This was a great  opportunity to further engage with one of our charity partners as well  as hearing inspiring stories from these young speakers. Further to this,  it was an opportunity for these young people to share and inform the  Bennelong Foundation community their challenges, issues and lived  experience, as well as other issues facing their communities – many of  the challenges we address through our granting programmes. The speakers  represented backgrounds from Sudan, Vietnam, Samoa, and Syria. Included  in the group of speakers was Omar, one of our current scholarship and  internship recipients, who shared his moving story of fleeing from  war-torn Syria, after losing everything and experiencing trauma.    

Following  the storytelling, a buffet style lunch was served in the Bangarra Group  boardroom, catered by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre catering social  enterprise.

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