Environment Victoria helps green Flemington’s Multicultural Eid Festival
September 2009
Eid is a celebration marking the end of the Muslim month of Ramadan, and on Saturday 26 September 2009, a Multicultural Eid Festival was held in Flemington to bring its diverse Muslim and non-Muslim communities together in celebration. Environment Victoria’s GreenTown program was there, sharing environmental information with enthusiastic community members.
GreenTown is working with Flemington’s East African community and, with funding from Sustainability Victoria, has trained ten members of this community as home sustainability assessors. The training was held in June and July and taught the ten assessors how households use energy and water and produce waste, and the best sustainable living solutions to reduce our consumption of these precious resources. The training also covered how to discuss home sustainability in a way that is culturally appropriate. These ten assessors are now busily delivering free home sustainability assessments for Ethiopian, Eritrean, Somali and Sudanese families living in Flemington’s public housing estate.
Environment Victoria was invited by the Flemington community to be part of festival. To promote their achievements as local sustainability champions, several GreenTown Assessors and our Community Liaison Consultant Abdul Wedai helped Environment Victoria's Nina Bailey and Natalia Valenzuela run the GreenTown stall at the festival. We held our stall together with the Ethiopian coffee stall, and it was a hub of African hospitality, great coffee and free sustainable living advice. We handed out GreenTown flyers on how to live sustainably in public housing, translated into Arabic, Oromo, Amharic and Tigrinya. We also distributed water saving information in these community languages, translated for free for GreenTown by City West Water. Lots of community members said they loved getting environmental information in their own language.
The Multicultural Eid Festival was organised by Jesuit Social Services, Moonee Valley City Council and a number of local community groups. GreenTown has also involved a lot of committed groups working together: in Flemington we have been working in partnership with the Flemington Project, Moreland Energy Foundation, Moonee Valley City Council, City West Water and a steering committee of East African community groups such as the Somali Community of Victoria, the Eritrean Community of Victoria and the African Think Tank. The East African community in Flemington is the third group to take part in our GreenTown program, with the Arabic and Assyrian Chaldean community in Moreland and the Turkish community in Hume coming before them. We are now busy getting the program running with the Indigenous community in Darebin.
