National Anti-Racism Framework
How Polaron helped address racism in educational settings, empowering schools to implement anti-racism strategies and fostering inclusivity among students and staff.
Overview
Polaron worked extensively with the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) and the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia for this campaign.
The Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) is an independent statutory organisation that protects and promotes human rights in Australia and internationally. It is Australia’s National Human Rights Institution.
The Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA) is the peak national body representing Australians from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Its goal is to advocate and promote issues on behalf of its constituency to the government, business and the broader community.
The campaign
In 2022, AHRC released the National Anti-Racism Framework Scoping Report, providing a summary of what the Commission heard about a national anti-racism framework from communities, sector organisations, government, scholars and expert knowledge holders to date.
The Community Guide to the Scoping Report was created to highlight the principles and themes from the initial scoping phase. The AHRC engaged Polaron to translate the Community Guides to be distributed.
Taking findings from this Scoping Reports, FECCA engaged us to develop culturally safe resources to tackle racism in schools, ensuring broad representation and authenticity across Australia’s urban and regional areas.
The work
We translated the Scoping Report into 7 languages: Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Samoan, Vietnamese, Burmese, Farsi and Swahili. The translations were reviewed by members from community ogranisations and internally checked against standards and style guides for each language to ensure quality and culturally appropriate messages.
For the next phase of the campaign, Polaron ensured the success of the consultations through:
- developing training and translated materials in nine languages
- facilitating consultations with migrant and refugee communities
- coordinating project logistics and managed contracts
- conducting evaluations and reporting
Taking learnings and insights from the consultations, we then co-designed in-language factsheets about racism, addressing what it looks like and how to address and report it.
The project helped deliver culturally relevant resources to tackle racism in schools, ensuring broad representation and authenticity across Australia’s urban and regional areas.