Institution
Cultural & Indigenous Research Centre Australia
Funding
The Movember Foundation
Award type
Request for proposal
Project completion year
2016
Project brief
Operating between July 2014 and December 2016, the objective of the New Roots project was to improve the health and wellbeing of males recently settled in Australia through a humanitarian visa from the Arabic, Farsi-Dari and Tamil speaking communities:
- Arabic speakers are predominately from Iraq and Syria;
- Farsi speakers from Iran and Dari speakers from Afghanistan (they are mutually intelligible languages)
- Tamil speakers are from Sri Lanka (either directly or via southern India).
The New Roots project was developed by Settlement Services International (SSI) in partnership with beyondblue with donations from the Movember Foundation. The project developed three outputs: a smartphone application for the community, an online toolkit for case managers, and a community leader training package.
Following a public launch in December 2015, the pilot project operated in NSW through to December 2016 and was independently evaluated by the Cultural and Indigenous Research Centre Australia.
The evaluation found that both the New Roots App and Toolkit have been well received and have had high levels of usage. Qualitative data also identifies a positive response to the New Roots App with increases in knowledge and positive changes in behaviour among SSI clients.
Given the progress of the New Roots project towards meeting the identified short-term and medium-term outcomes, it has the potential to contribute to the social and emotional wellbeing of the target population in the future.