WALKING WITH THE EXCLUDED
By Moh Moh Thet
Employment Support Officer at Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) Australia in Sydney
Moh began a student intern placement at JRS in March 2024. In June, she was then hired part-time as an Employment Officer in their Employment Program while she finished university. She continues to hold the employment role and at the end of November she also took on the role of Project Officer in the JRS Finding Safety Project. She works with refugees and people seeking asylum, helping them to be job-ready and find meaningful work in Australia.
As part of the employment team, I support people from diverse professional backgrounds: medical officers, engineers, IT technicians, finance and banking professionals, care workers, customer service providers—the list goes on. People who need employment support from our team come with a wide range of personal experiences. Many have endured trauma, both before or after arriving in Australia. Despite these challenges, the people we serve are resilient, hopeful and eager to create a better life here in this country.
Many of those whom I work with have faced displacement, war or political persecution in their home countries. While Australia has granted them residency or permanency, they continue to struggle for a variety of reasons: employment barriers and visa uncertainty, as well as the devaluation of their credentials. I have seen people who were high-achieving professionals in their home countries but then arrive here and face lengthy and costly processes to practise their chosen profession here in Australia. Many must make the difficult choice to pursue different careers as a quicker way to earn income.
Our team works hard to address these barriers, to set expectations, advocate for the people we serve and find opportunities for them to pursue meaningful employment in our community. It is so important that we empower the people we serve to find employment, as this is an essential pathway to the self-determination and security that refugees and people seeking asylum deserve to find in Australia.
Even more than this, we also know that the people we serve have so much to offer our communities and we would like to help them reach their full potential. That is why, in addition to training and sector advocacy, we also support the people we serve to set staggered goals – short, medium and long-term – and connect them with mentors in their fields, in order to assist them in returning to their chosen professional careers.
I mostly work with women from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds and who encounter significant additional barriers to long-term employment. This is particularly the case for single mothers and women who are experiencing domestic violence, who shoulder the burden of looking after their families while also facing three related challenges: housing insecurity, financial insecurity and food insecurity. I find it inspiring to see how these women face tough challenges with resilience, and to watch how they thrive when they are given opportunities to rebuild and feel supported with essential services like ours.
But it should not just be up to these women to be strong enough to withstand overwhelming and structural injustices. For many of our long-term clients, in addition to myriad hurdles, their visa status often restricts access to Centrelink support, or intermittently denies work rights, making it challenging to secure long-term employment. These barriers only increase women’s vulnerability to further abuse, as they are reliant on a partner’s income to keep themselves and their children out of homelessness.
When clients do find work, they can often experience further bullying in the workplace, or harassment by their partners and relatives. It is not easy – but they keep thriving.?At JRS, we also have a dedicated “Women’s Space” which provides female survivors with a safe and supportive environment from which to rebuild. Both our Employment Program and the Finding Safety Project can collaborate here to find tailored and holistic solutions for the women we serve. But we also know that the missing piece is the need for expanded community services and a social support structure tailored to assist refugee and asylum-seeking women impacted by domestic and family violence.
Another major barrier I have observed in Australian workplaces is a lack of cultural and disability sensitivity. People with disabilities from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds face multi-faceted challenges, including limited social support, unstable employment, visa issues, language barriers and the complexities of settling into a new country. In the era of virtual meetings and interviews, factors like language barriers and hearing impairments, for example, create further obstacles. Although many organisations and employment agencies support refugees and people seeking asylum, there is a definite need to understand the psychosocial barriers of refugees and asylum seekers with greater cultural and disability sensitivity in workplaces.
Another barrier we tackle in the Employment Program is digital literacy skills. Digital skills are essential for training, job readiness, applications, as well as tracking job opportunities. We are fortunate to receive donated laptops, software and data from generous organisations like The Laptop Initiative, which makes job-seeking so much easier for the women I work with. However, we always have a waiting list for devices and we welcome any new partners who may be interested in bridging the digital divide and helping to support refugees and people seeking asylum to find meaningful work.
Looking forward to next year, we are excited to have some funding through both the Digital Sisters Program at Good Things Australia, and Impact100 Sydney to provide digital literacy training workshops to the women in our Employment Program. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to work in this space and to help provide real and meaningful support to refugees and people seeking asylum, but we could not do any of this without our generous community of supporters standing alongside us.
I came to JRS because I’m committed to working with people who experience gender-based violence (GBV) and especially women who experience domestic and family violence (DFV). As someone with lived experience, I hope to give women who are exposed to DFV the services and support that my mother and I didn’t have. With that in mind, when I applied for the JRS internship, I expressed my commitment to preventing GBV and DFV to my supervisor at university. Accordingly, they connected me with JRS’ Finding Safety project, which was exactly what I wanted to work on.
The community we focus on is being marginalised by social services and policies, despite being one of the most vulnerable groups. While it is very meaningful to be able to help them, I can empathise strongly as most of them come from a similar background to mine, so I can relate to their stories and pain.
The accompany-serve-advocate mission at JRS appeals to me because it is holistic, giving empowerment to the community we serve. I love working in this environment with dedicated colleagues who treat one another with kindness. I like the theoretical approaches and principles that we use, and I feel our work is meaningful and necessary for the community we serve.
Banner image by Tomas Griger, Canva.