Celebrating diversity and belonging

With over three decades of experience working with diverse communities, Dr Sonja Hood has committed the last 15 years to advocating for social cohesion in Australia. Hood is CEO of the Scanlon Foundation, president of the North Melbourne Football Club and is involved in numerous community focused initiatives.

Growing up in multicultural Melbourne, Hood first encountered diversity in high school when she was exposed to students from diferent backgrounds, particularly Vietnamese and Chinese students. This exposure to cultural diversity was profoundly impactful, eventually inspiring her to build her career around helping migrant communities.

“I love the diversity of Australia. I love the fact that we are a multi-

faith, multi-ethnic country. I’m hugely interested in our history, both the positives and negatives of that … Some people feel like there’s a mainstream and then there are people who are different. But actually we’re all different,” Hood told The AJN.

Hood will be moderating a panel titled “Diversity & Exclusion” as part of the National Council of Jewish Women Australia (NCJWA) national conference in Sydney this weekend. For Hood, the panel is a chance to explore how people’s diverse cultures, backgrounds and experiences can help to build better interactions and communities.

“I think it picks up nicely on this point at the moment that people may feel that their diversity is the thing that doesn’t make them belong … My personal view is that if we can focus on the places where people feel safe and work out how we replicate that, then we can build from a place of strength rather than from a place of deficit,” she said.

When asked about the current discourse around social cohesion in Australia, one of Hood’s greatest concerns was the loss of our ability to disagree with civility.

“We have lost the ability to listen to things that might not be comfortable for us, and we’ve lost the ability to make space for things that might not be comfortable.”

Hood acknowledged the current Royal Commission process has been painful for the Jewish community but reinforced the importance of knowledge and exposure.

“Lots of Australians will never have met a Jewish person or understand much about Jewish culture or the Jewish faith … It’s incredibly important for the stories to be heard by people outside of the community.”

The NCJWA National Conference is taking place from August 22-24.

For more: ncjwa.org.au/conference