Thursday Three - 23 03 2023

• Celebrating cultural and linguistic diversity

• AAG Member survey and strategic planning

• AAG's Online Community on track for launch

Celebrating cultural and linguistic diversity

Capturing the cultural and linguistic diversity in Australia is essential for the effective delivery of health and social services. But what does 'diversity'; mean to each of us? What do we think of when someone mentions 'culture'? We conducted a mixed methods study of AAG's National Office team (not really... we brainstormed!). And here is some of the diversity we came up with, from our small group of eight. This has been a fascinating (and fun) exercise. You will see how our backgrounds and preferences will inform our experience of ageing. Here we are, in random order.

View a full size version here

Getting serious now, in our new position paper on Capturing Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in Australia, we discuss the importance of terminology, present the variables used by the Australian Government to measure cultural and linguistic diversity, and recommend how to improve the capture of diversity data. This report is another way AAG works to improve the experience of ageing through connecting research, policy and practice.

AAG member survey and strategic plan

 

Thank you to the members who completed the AAG member survey a few weeks ago. In all, we had an 11% response rate. At a glance, the main reasons for being an AAG member included the opportunity to share and access information, network with people from different disciplines and career development. Most respondents stayed informed through Thursday Three and direct emails, and want the frequency and format of communication to remain relatively unchanged. There was strong interest in a community forum (which is coming!), but improvements are needed to the website (we agree and are working on it).

In the coming weeks, we will provide a summary of the survey results on our website. However, the preliminary report was used to inform discussions at the recent strategic planning session of the AAG Board. Member feedback was particularly useful when considering the high level questions of 'Where are we now? and 'Where do we want to be?' 
Coming together for this strategic planning session was highly valued by Board members, as well as the leadership team from National Office. It was also good to be joined by one of AAG's financial officers, Nicole Butera. To those who couldn't make the event (or the photo), you were missed!

Standing, L-R: Meg Polacsek, Kate-Ellen Elliott, Victoria Cornell, Ben Poona, Claudia Meyer, Anita Goh, Katrina Radford, Gill Lewin and Amber Mills
Seated, L-R: Linda Rosenman, Nicole Butera, Renu Borst, Anita Westera and Michael Tan

AAG's Online Community on track for launch

This month, AAG's first Online Community will go live. Given the significant effort it's taken to reach this point, but you might wonder why we've devoted our time and effort to this initiative. Well, to answer that, we're going to draw on a few cliches:

• We think outside the box
• Actions speak louder than words
• We're in this together
• There's strength in numbers
• We'll all be on the same page, or singing from the same songsheet
• And, yes, Michael's been like a kid in a candy store

We go live on Wednesday 29th of March

One more thing: Spam and virus blocks

Spam and virus protection programs have been going into overdrive lately, with many AAG members unable to receive or access communications from AAG, including password reset request emails. We share your frustration! If you’re having this problem, please:

• Ask your IT administrator to put AAG on your organisation’s ‘white list’
• Mark AAG as a ‘safe sender’ (in Outlook, click on ‘Junk’ and select ‘Never block sender’)

• Once the password reset emails from AAG can get through to you, log into your AAG membership account and reset your password.