This guide shows 5 activities community workers can use. These activities can help understand and address a community’s feelings towards mental health.
Some of the circumstances in which you might use this guide include if:
- you’ve noticed more clients reporting mental health concerns
- you know the community you work with has struggled with issues around mental health
- you know the community you work with holds an unaddressed stigma towards mental health
- you’re developing a program or content around mental health.
At the end of this guide, you’ll find worksheets and other resources you can use when running these workshops. We created and tested these resources with people from the community. You can edit, adapt or use these resources for inspiration.
Download the facilitator guide (PDF 987 KB) Download the facilitator guide (Word 8.5 MB)
We have also prepared a presentation template to accompany the facilitator guide. We encourage you to use and adapt the template or create your own entirely.
Document summary
Research revealed that the Muslim community based in Darebin were disengaged with pandemic related communications.
A further survey revealed that this community were experiencing struggles with their mental health, social connectedness, ability to care for their families and their financial stability.
In 2023, Burnet Institute and its project partners Your Community Health, the Islamic Museum of Australia and the Australian Multicultural Foundation collaborated on developing resources for and with the Muslim community in Darebin to understand and address these issues.
Burnet and its project partners used this information to develop a co-design process (which led to the creation of the activities in this guide). This assisted the project partners in developing a responsive public health intervention.
The activities have been further developed so that they can be delivered in other communities. This development process has included insights from other similar projects run with multicultural communities.
Access more resources on the VOICE partnership page.