“No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark.”
Our Mission
The global refugee crisis is the greatest humanitarian crises of our time. There are over 25.9 million refugees. We know that we need to do something. Our vision is a world where all refugees can find protection and refugee children can obtain an education. As a committed group of Melburnians from all walks of life we want to do our bit to mitigate the harrowing impact of this crisis on children and their families.
Source: UNHCR Global Trends Report 2018
Our History
In 1998 Westgate Baptist Community (WBC) in Melbourne’s west welcomed the first wave of refugee people from Myanmar, and many of these new arrivals became part of the WBC community. As the connection grew between these communities, members of WBC first started visiting refugee camps on the Thailand/Myanmar border and urban refugee communities in Malaysia.
In 2013 after further visits to Malaysia, Westgate Refugee Support (WRS) was established by WBC members with a goal to focus on providing practical ongoing support to schools for refugee children.
WRS volunteers partner with the schools to provide teaching, teacher training, funding applications and reports, child protection policy development and other financial and practical support.
Read more about our history here.
"WRS has shown me the power that we have, as a community, to make a profound impact in the lives of our world’s most vulnerable. The work we do is not just about providing tangible resources but building honest and equal relationships with the refugee communities we work with, to ensure we are truly empowering them in the best possible way.”
— Liam Taylor, Volunteer
Advocacy
As a group, we have expressed our disappointment with the reduction in refugee intake, continued ill treatment of asylum seekers and reduction in foreign aid by our current government. We seek to meet with parliamentarians in both government and opposition, and attend refugee rallies in the hope to continue the conversation about how we can show Aussie compassion to the most vulnerable of our world. Below is a documentary made by a WRS member about the state of refugee politics in Melbourne, including interviews with current MPs, Karen, Afghan and Sudanese refugees and Rev Tim Costello.
“To be stateless is bad enough, but to have your own state declare war on you and render you a non-citizen is the most terrifying thing. This is utter vulnerability with no protector. ”
Teacher Training
One of the key needs of our partner schools is access to teachers. We have worked in providing teacher training courses for young student teachers who help run our partner schools, supported by their local communities.
We have been able to provide hundreds of hours of training in a flexible model over 4 years, most recently using the Thambay curriculum developed for use by the Karen refugees in Thailand. Supportive learning and behavioural management is crucial as the schools cope with traumatised and displaced children, who cannot play freely outside so live 24/7 in small ‘apartments’ with multiple families sharing the space and cost.
“Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family. ”
