About

Our Stories features the stories of four refugees building a new life in Australia. Alpha, Shabnam, David and Aya each arrived in Australia at a different time and from different ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds. Our Stories explores our common humanity and highlights both the common and unique challenges faced by our newest Australians. Through the website, users are encouraged to step into the shoes of a refugee as they start a new life in Australia and face a series of difficult scenarios encountered by that refugee.

In partnership with Cool Australia, we have also developed a new curriculum for teachers, about refugees building a new life in Australia. We hope these lessons will inspire young Australians to consider their attitudes towards refugees and take positive action to foster respect among their peers and create a more inclusive and tolerant multicultural society.

Acknowledgements

Our Stories acknowledges and thanks the following people and organisations for their invaluable assistance and input into this project:

  • Alpha, Shabnam, David and Aya (a pseudonym), for sharing their inspiring stories
  • the Our Stories working committee, including Tal Shmerling, Tali Rechtman, Julia Goldberg and Matti Borowski, for their hard work and dedication to bringing this project to life
  • Cool Australia for co-developing the teacher resources
  • the dozens of volunteer educators, for their contribution to the development of the teacher resources
  • Sam Rankin, for editing all the video footage
  • Kat Rosendorff from Squigloo, for designing and developing the website
  • Jacob Komesaroff, for creating the illustrations for Aya’s story
  • representatives of Liberty Victoria’s Rights Advocacy Project, who contributed policy content to the refugees’ stories
  • Stand Up: Jewish commitment to a better world, for supporting this project
  • LaunchPad, for seed funding this project
  • Other generous individuals whose donations helped this project to come to life