Fieldwork and research

Now that the co-operative was formally established, the real work for VICSEG staff began. Fieldwork and research became the number one priority for this small but dedicated team. The Ethnic Children’s Services Workers spent much of their time in those early years driving around Melbourne and Victoria visiting childcare centres and making contact with children’s services providers. Their purpose was to promote VICSEG and obtain as much information as possible about the services that currently existed and what support was being offered to migrant families.

Fieldwork and research were vital to VICSEG in establishing itself as a credible organisation and in becoming known within the children’s services sector. This grassroots work was critical not only in forming relationships with ethnic communities, but also to gather information on the areas where help was needed most, the numbers of families utilising existing children’s services and - in some cases - the reasons why available services were not being used.

Ethnic Children’s Services Worker Gabrielle Fakhri (left, with baby carrier) taking a family out, perhaps to visit a childcare centre.
Courtesy Gabrielle Fakhri

In the first two years, VICSEG staff investigated Yugoslav communities in Whittlesea Shire and Springvale, Spanish-speaking communities in Ascot Vale and Springvale, Vietnamese communities in Footscray and Flemington, and Lebanese communities in Williamstown. A team approach was adopted, where staff would spend three months working together in one area with a high population of migrants and an identified lack of children’s services. 

Williamstown was chosen first and VICSEG staff worked together intensively to assess the accessibility of local children’s services for Lebanese families in the area. 

Throughout their first decade of operation, VICSEG staff also conducted fieldwork and established connections with Cambodian, Macedonian, Croatian and Chaldean ethnic groups and carried out four major studies into the childcare needs of Turkish, Filipino, Lebanese and Chinese-speaking communities. The Ethnic Children’s Services Workers worked hard to gain trust and build relationships. But this was not without challenges, and Gabrielle Fakhri admits ‘we struggled to find our place in the world’.

My first three years was asking all the different ethnic groups: What kind of childcare do you want? Who do you want looking after your child? How do you want them to look after your child? What is it about your culture, your religion, your background, that you want your child to have while you're not there? If your child is in childcare from 7.30 in the morning to 6 at night because you're in a factory five days a week, then someone else is bringing up your child. What values do you want that child to have?

Gabrielle Fakhri, Ethnic Children’s Services Worker, VICSEG

The case studies and fieldwork that the VICSEG staff undertook led to several key findings: 

• When services existed, many migrant families were unaware that they were available for them.
• Language was a major barrier with many families concerned about sending their children to childcare centres where they would have difficulty communicating with carers.
• Childcare centres were seen as Anglocentric and not meant for families from non-English speaking backgrounds.
• Some cultures believed childcare was the responsibility of the family and therefore were reluctant to send their children to childcare.
• Many felt attending childcare would result in children losing touch with their ethnicity and cultural heritage.

VICSEG found that even basic information on the range of children’s services offered was not readily available to migrant groups. To address this gap, VICSEG began to develop its own resources and education tools: material for families such as pamphlets on how to get access to children’s services and the benefit of these services to families. In addition, VICSEG also developed material for children’s services providers on various cultures and ethnic groups, to increase their awareness of these communities’ cultural needs. 

Gabrielle Fakhri and Jeanette Hourani during a radio interview.

The early fieldwork demonstrated to VICSEG that the situation for newly arrived migrant families was in fact far more serious than had been anticipated. The painful and challenging realities of making a new life in Australia began to be uncovered. Stories of families forced to send their children back to their home country, or to leave their children in substandard care, or even completely unsupervised while parents worked to earn a living, began to emerge. So too did tales of discriminatory attitudes amongst service providers, often in areas of Victoria where numbers of migrant children in childcare were very low compared to numbers in the general community, despite being well-serviced with childcare centres. Improving migrant families’ access to appropriate childcare became more and more urgent to VICSEG, particularly with many other agencies and groups reluctant to take on such an immense task. 

VICSEG staff had first-hand experiences of migration and could identify with the ethnic communities they were working to assist. Although each of VICSEG’s Ethnic Children’s Services Workers had strong ties with particular communities, they were also trained to be versatile and to use their cross-cultural skills to connect with people from a variety of cultures. While their own backgrounds and experiences could often ease the process of relating to and communicating with ethnic groups, staff nevertheless endured difficult employment conditions. 

My children were in childcare and I used to say to people, ‘I estimate that I spend two hours at night with my children, and what it is is, “let's go home, have a quick bath, feed you, eat, go to bed”.’ There was no communication, there was no time for me to put a value. And Saturday I cleaned the house and did the shopping, and Sunday we went to church and had lunch with the family, and I'm thinking, this childcare is bringing up my children.

My children spoke Italian because they went to an Italian childcare centre … there was no Arabic culture there, it was all Italian, and I was happy with that. But they came home speaking Italian – this is multicultural – but the Italian values were similar to the Lebanese values so that's why I chose that centre … that was as close as I could get to my culture, that's why I used it.

Gabrielle Fakhri, Ethnic Children’s Services Worker, VICSEG

Despite government funding for VICSEG, the organisation was run on a very limited budget. On a weekly travel allowance of just $10 each, VICSEG staff often covered hundreds of kilometres a week trying to reach childcare centres in every corner of the state. Although there were resources for only a very small number of staff members in the early days of VICSEG, this brought everyone closer. These foundational staff members saw themselves as trailblazers, working above and beyond to meet the very real needs of these communities.

VICSEG’s dedicated group of Ethnic Children’s Services Workers devoted many long and difficult hours to reach and engage with as many Victorian childcare centres and ethnic communities as they could. Yet, however many kilometres they covered, childcare centres they visited, workshops they conducted and pamphlets they disseminated, there were always more communities to engage with and assist and more children’s services agencies to resource. 

The inaugural meeting of the Family and Reproductive Rights Education Program (FARREP) group, at the VICSEG Nicholson Street office.

In its early years of operation, VICSEG fought continually for additional funding to resource more communities and children’s services providers, as well as to spread its general philosophy: that all children and all families have the right to access quality childcare that is sensitive and respectful of their culture, language and religion.

Arabic women’s group, Broadmeadows.