MCWH was recently funded by the Attorney General's Department to conduct the Sharing Our Stories (SOS) Project:
A Woman to Woman Approach.

The project will enable a wider understanding of human rights within the community by providing 34 multilingual human rights education sessions to immigrant and refugee women across Victoria. Sessions will be held in over 20 languages: Arabic, Cantonese, Croatian, Dari, Dinka, English, Farsi, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Karen, Khmer, Lotuka, Macedonian, Madi, Mandarin, Marathi, Somali, Spanish, Tigre, Tigrigna, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

MCWH delivers tailored community education programmes using a human rights based approach. The SOS Project will more specifically create a deeper understanding of human rights using a story telling method.

'Sharing stories' has been a key teaching and learning strategy for MCWH community education sessions and has proved to be an effective method. Using this proven method, the SOS Project will encourage women to understand human rights by reflecting on their personal experiences. The collecting of women's stories will form an integral part of the project's evaluation and will highlight key issues that need to be addressed in MCWH's provision of appropriate resources. Culturally specific case studies have also been developed with the assistance of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission (VEOHRC) to illustrate common human rights issues that are experienced by immigrant and refugee women. These will assist MCWH's Bilingual Health Educators (BHEs) to deliver community education sessions.

The SOS training for MCWH's BHEs was recently conducted across two days by facilitators, Kenton Miller and Carol Ransley, from VEOHRC. Additional speakers included representatives from Everyday People Everyday Rights, and Victoria Legal Aid, the latter provided MCWH with additional resources.

Our BHEs are currently conducting education sessions within their communities, covering four important topics: " What are human rights? " What human rights issues are relevant to immigrant and refugee women? " How can I recognise my rights have been violated? " My rights have been breached, what can I do?

Education sessions will be conducted until November 2011.