Name
Nadya Stani

Birthplace
Shanawan, Egypt

Lives
Sydney, Australia

Your organisation/community Freelance journalist and community arts worker

Profile

I worked at SBS and the ABC as a daily news and current affairs reporter and documentary maker before becoming co-ordinator of the Community Harmony project in Bankstown, based at the Coolaburoo Neighbourhood Centre.

I've worked in community arts for some time and got quite excited by the idea that the Community Harmony project was open enough for me to use the arts as well as work specifically on media reporting of Bankstown.

The Community Harmony Project, funded by Bankstown Council, is about celebrating the diversity of Bankstown's many communities and changing the way one of Sydney's most talked about towns is portrayed. This is being done through innovative arts and cultural projects designed to bring different communities together. The project also works on developing media training programs for the area, as well as working with local and national media on changing the way race is reported.

What can I say? Cultural diversity is one of those realities that we haven't come to terms with properly. But I guess the question is, how do you get people to turn around their assumptions about race … and in this case, about race and crime? I think at a community level, people need to really 'see' and 'be' with each other. I don't know any other way of doing that with disparate groups or communities who fear each other than through the arts.

For example, "A day in the life" is a multicultural youth video project where young people confront the ' other' by working with a young person from another cultural background. They will also crew on and co-produce each other's video. "Ten stories" captures 10 people from Bankstown's indigenous, refugee, Anglo and migrant communities via photographs. Photos will be installed as posters around Bankstown's bus shelters.

But the biggest challenge is the media. Whenever you mention the word 'Lebanese' and 'Bankstown' to a journalist, the association is immediately made with crime. Just as it is with 'Vietnamese' and 'Cabramatta.' In addition, it's not just commercial media journalists who make those connections, even 'thinking' journalists make those assumptions.

So what to do about something so entrenched that people don't even think about it? Apart from taking the position that change takes time, the project is developing media training workshops for the Bankstown community; making links with journalists and media organisations and using what is being created in Bankstown to promote a different image of the community to the a broader audience, as well as to ourselves.

I think there's one thing that's important to those of us who live in diverse communities and come from migrant heritage – and that is, we need to be awake to the effects of negative reporting on our sense of self. So feeling empowered about the positive things we do is really crucial in the process of belonging, and therefore the ability to take on the difficult things with confidence.