Wesa Chau and Christine Yeung are launching a series of evidence-based online workshops, called Resilience Against Racism, to help people build resilience to cope with racism.
The workshops are specifically designed for people who may have experienced racism personally, or for those who have been a direct or indirect witness to racism. The idea is to empower individuals and communities to address racism when they, or someone they know, are faced with it.
The program has been designed by Christine Yeung, a leading workplace psychologist.
Yeung is leading the workshops alongside Wesa Chau, the CEO of Cultural Intelligence, a consulting company that specialises in raising the understanding of the power of cultural diversity through research, training and consulting.
Chau says she has personally experienced, witnessed and heard of countless stories of racism, and that incidents of racism can have a deep, negative psychological impact on individuals.
“There is a gap in the current support system where racism is not typically serious enough for people to seek counselling services or psychologists because it may not be directly associated with mental illness,” Chau says.
“This is why we’re launching Resilience Against Racism to support our communities as they deal with and combat racism in their own lives.”
According to a 2019 survey from the Scanlon Foundation, almost one in five Australians had experienced racial or religious discrimination in the previous 12 months.
The COVID-19 pandemic has also seen a further spike in anti-Asian racism.
Yeung says the workshop model combines research into resilience, racism and racial identity and carefully consider how Asian-Australians might build resilience differently to other communities.
“We also fill a current gap in the mental health system to support people who do not feel their situation is severe enough to see a counsellor or psychologist, and therefore provide tools and tips to help them help themselves and their community,” she said.
Resilience Against Racism’s online workshops will use an evidence-based approach, and are facilitated by trained, culturally diverse workplace psychologists.
They have also been co-designed by people with lived experience of racism, and by social innovators who understand how cultural diversity impacts on the delivery of the programs.
Resilience Against Racism is backed by Study Melbourne’s International Student Welfare Program and the Scanlon Foundation, and will launch on September 17 via Zoom.
You can sign up to Resilience Against Racism’s launch here.