This is the old BARC! website. Go to the new improved BARC! website for current information

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BARC! Overview

BARC!, the Brisbane Actionweb for Refugee Collaboration, is an initiative of the Brisbane City Council, auspiced by the Queensland Council of Social Service (QCOSS), to increase the capacity of the Brisbane refugee sector to meet the needs of refugees and asylum seekers in the greater Brisbane area. Through enabling the sector to work more effectively, the BARC! website reduces the hardship faced by refugees and asylum seekers. Your help is needed to sustain this essential resource.

The BARC! Project began in August 2002 and has provided an effective, low cost solution to critical issues facing the Brisbane refugee sector: duplication of effort, matching resources with needs, and increasing collaboration across the sector.

BARC! Needs Your Help

Current funding for BARC! ends in October 2003. While many groups have committed their support, without funds to maintain it, BARC! will disappear. Without BARC! the refugee sector in the greater Brisbane area will lose a cheap and effective tool to facilitate collaboration, resulting in organisations and groups becoming isolated from colleagues and potential supporters, and refugees and asylum seekers in Brisbane facing even greater hardship.

BARC! is seeking partners to help it develop into a far more stable and sustainable resource.

The Brisbane Refugee Sector

Increasing needs

2 000 refugees and asylum seekers arrive in Brisbane each year. Many face extreme hardship, including poverty, homelessness, acute and chronic physical and mental health problems, social isolation and legal problems. Restrictive visa conditions have created a new underclass. For example, many asylum seekers spend years in Australia with no permission to work, no welfare payment, and no Medicare access. Media misinformation and misunderstanding in the community further compounds this hardship.

Decreasing resources from government and private funders

Resources available to support the Brisbane refugee sector are decreasing. Federal Government funding has moved away from support services for refugees and asylum seekers toward ensuring that refugees do not arrive in Australia. Furthermore, Federal Government funding for social services generally has declined, resulting in increased competition for the scarce resources available through private funding bodies.

Increasing public concern and support

Growing public concern for refugees and asylum seekers in Brisbane has led to more people seeking opportunities to help. They come from a range of backgrounds and are willing to contribute their skills and resources to support asylum seekers and refugees. There are now more than fifty refugee support groups in greater Brisbane participating in public education and service delivery across the region.

Prior to BARC! there was very little awareness of what groups existed, and what they were doing. Workers and volunteers were too overwhelmed with the immediate needs that they faced to be able to develop and maintain information sharing processes with relevant groups and the general public in Brisbane. Furthermore, without any starting point, all networking was hit and miss. This lack of coordination resulted in:

Needs not connecting with resources

Many needs remained unmet whilst resources available to meet these needs remained untapped, resulting in unnecessary hardship for refugees and asylum seekers and a sense of disempowerment for the person/s with the resources.

Duplication of effort

Groups have struggled through the same issues, duplicating resources and work, not knowing that others in Brisbane could have eased their way. Similarly, groups unknowingly planned functions for the same date, inadvertently competing with each other. Valuable time, effort and money has been wasted.

Minimal influence on policy makers

Groups acting in isolation are less effective at making their voice heard by policy makers and the broader public.

Without effective mechanisms for collaboration, massive resources have been lost to the sector. The end result of this has been unnecessary hardship for asylum seekers and refugees in Brisbane and increased frustration for concerned members of the public.

Collaboration

A collaboration mechanism has been needed that would both connect the groups/organizations within the sector and connect the sector with the broader public. A shared website and email list was found to be the most effective tool for meeting these requirements because:

• It is accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. People who do not access the Internet can receive information through fortnightly emails that can be printed and distributed via friends.

• It has reach, connecting interested people who may have no prior connection to the sector. This happens through Internet search engines and emails being easily forwarded on through networks.

• It is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Whenever a group or individual wishes to seek (or share) information they can.

• It is cheap. Emailouts and updates to web content present no marginal cost. Automation of web content and development of volunteer structures make it possible to reduce staffing costs to a minimal level.

• It is quick and easy to make contributions to such a website via email or online forms. This is a minimal effort for the groups but reaps great rewards, through posting on the website and email list.

Internet collaboration tools complement other collaboration tools, such as printed mailouts, face-to-face collaboration meetings and telephone networking. However, Internet tools also provide the infrastructure to facilitate collaboration on a day to day level, thereby revolutionising the sector.

The BARC! Project

BARC! Provides a ‘supersite’ for the sector offering a pool of resources, needs, organisations, people, actions and ideas, thereby fostering greater sharing and collaboration across the sector and with the general public, government and business communities. This will allow organisations to avoid duplication of effort, ensure that available resources are connected with needs and facilitate a more cohesive voice within the sector.

Information currently available through BARC! includes:

• coming events and local news

• volunteer and employment opportunities

• requests for assistance

• campaigns and action that concerned citizens can participate in

• fundraising gifts and services

• issues and news

• fact sheets, reports and resource manuals

• multimedia resources

• categorised bibliography of books and journal articles

• email lists

• resources for groups

• listings of local, national and international organisations

Collaboration into the future

Very few groups within the sector currently have websites but this will change over time, as more groups come to recognise the value of this medium. There is the potential for this growth to divert traffic away from BARC!, reducing the collaborative benefits available through having a single, significant, central website. This would re-fragment the sector, resulting in the familiar problems of duplication of effort and needs not connecting with resources.

BARC! turns this threat into an opportunity by making available all of its content as shared content for free inclusion in any other website. This is achieved via a mechanism that automatically keeps the content up-to-date and modifies its appearance to suit the host website. It is particularly encouraging Brisbane refugee websites to use its shared content. The benefits of this are:

• Increased ownership/commitment by groups

• Groups can build a great site with little effort

• Comprehensive, regularly updated content available to sites that would otherwise be static and/or out of date

• Customisable sites. The group can choose what BARC! content they would like to include, to create a site relevant to their community of interest

• Because the shared content is drawn from the whole refugee sector in Brisbane, the recipient website becomes another vector for promoting collaboration. What may have been competition becomes another entry point for collaboration

• Increased use of BARC! content and therefore greater exposure of collaborative content

• It is likely that many sites will use shared collaborative content where it exists, rather than just creating their own. This will result in sites that promote collaboration rather than just the group’s own agenda. For example, groups will be likely to choose to use the shared calendar (promoting all Brisbane events) rather than creating a calendar of their own, which would just promote their own events.

Two examples of content sharing in action are the Calendar on the RCSC website  and the Local Organisations list on the RAC QLD website.

BARC! is making available the tools that it has used to produce shared content to allow others to make their content available for sharing. This provides a model for decentralised networks to support collaboration without requiring any centralised resources.

Impact of BARC!

Before the BARC! project many groups within the sector had no Internet presence at all. They are now part of a busy, highly visible, dynamic website and email list. BARC! consistently appears at the top of internet searches on all popular search engines where terms include ‘Brisbane’ and such items as ‘refugees’, ‘asylum seekers’ or ‘refugee claimants’.

BARC! and its sister site Refugees Online receive over 6 000 page views per month, or about 20 000 hits per month. They are the most visited refugee websites in Queensland. The BARC! email list has approximately 300 members as at July 2003 and new subscriptions continue at approximately 35 subscriptions per month.

Feedback received indicates that BARC! has been extremely successful in achieving its goals. Workers in the sector attribute increased knowledge of what is happening in the sector to BARC!. Groups are finding volunteers and other resources that they never would have before. Groups are using the BARC! calendar when planning events. The number of participants at refugee related events continues to increase. Groups receiving inquiries about helping refugees are referring callers directly to the BARC! website. BARC! is an exceptional resource and this is confirmed by the numerous enthusiastic testimonials provided by users, including:

As a support service to refugees we feel that what Barc offers is an extremely valuable resource, not only for service providers such as ourselves but also to the wider community most especially refugees themselves. Barc is a unique and innovative site. - Dee Hiller, QLD Program of Assistance to Survivors of Torture and Trauma

Prior to BARC being developed, the task keeping au fait with refugee support events was much messier and more time consuming than it is now. - George Eichinski, Annerley Literacy Centre

It is great to have the link with all the other refugee groups, and to be able to put things on the BARC website and know it will go to so many other groups who may be able to assist. - Sandra Waterton, Anglicare Refugee and Migrant Services

BARC is not only about the wonderful website and resources etc, it is founded on the experience, compassion, vast networking and relationship building that the team behind BARC so generously provide. This is invaluable, and seemingly very difficult to find elsewhere. - Jane Teague, Refugee Action Group, Caboolture

As a small community group running on the steam of volunteer time BARC is a great way to keep up with what is happening. It is one stop for contacting other Refugee Support Groups and refugee associated organisations, a way of seeing what people are up to and what they have done so we don't waste time duplicating. It is also a way of giving strength to small groups by allowing them to join with others for advocacy. - Deb Emery, Pine Rivers Asylum Seeker Support Group

The Future

BARC! is moving towards sustainability through developing its volunteer base, preparing for website automation, seeking funding partnerships and exploring other creative possibilities. In-kind support is providing much of the resourcing for BARC!. However, direct funding is still required to:

1. Maintain the core functions of BARC!.This requires a project coordinator for one day per week, costing $12 000 per year. Core functions include:

   1. Seeking and editing content.

   2. Maintaining the BARC! website and email newsletter.

   3. Providing basic supervision to volunteers.

   4. Responding to queries and requests for assistance.

   5. Basic promotional activities.

    

2. Improve and develop BARC! to best meet the needs of the sector and make it more sustainable. This requires a project coordinator for at least one additional day per week, costing another $12 000 per year. Over time, this developmental spending will reduce the cost of maintaining core functions. Functions include:

   1. Developing structures and processes for volunteer recruitment, training and support.

   2. Establishing, training and supporting a BARC! moderation group, to ensure the future sustainability of BARC!.

   3. Developing new content and features for BARC! in response to stakeholder needs.

   4. Overseeing the development of databases to automate the BARC! website.

   5. Implementing new promotional activities to find new users, hence increasing BARC!'s effectiveness as a collaboration tool.

   6. Exploring and implementing new strategies to gain independent, ongoing funding for BARC!

Support BARC!

BARC! needs your support to keep going. In assisting BARC! you can be sure that your contribution is helping to build a better Brisbane for all. Not only will you be helping to reduce the needless suffering that so many asylum seekers and refugees experience but you will also be supporting the building of a more involved, compassionate and harmonious community of Brisbane

Businesses and individuals can become gold ($2 000), silver ($1 000) or bronze ($500) partners for a year. Smaller contributions are also greatly appreciated.

Alternatively, consider sponsoring BARC! for a day or more per year. It costs $33 per day to keep the core functions of BARC! running. Get some friends together and sponsor a day each and you will be making a significant contribution to keeping BARC! going.

Your generous contribution will be acknowledged on the BARC! website and in the email news.

If you have any questions or great ideas regarding funding, we would love to hear from you. Please contact Chris Gibbings admin@barc.org.au.

To add an item or correct an item on this page, please email Chris Gibbings admin@barc.org.au

Page content provided by BARC! the Brisbane Actionweb for Refugee Collaboration as a free service. Find out how to use this content in your site.