The Multicultural Excellence Award was announced at the QPLA LEaD Conference Dinner on Thursday 27 March in Townsville. This new award recognises a public library service that demonstrates excellence in the delivery of multicultural library services.
Multicultural library services encompass a range of services provided to culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities, including Indigenous peoples, and acknowledge and celebrate Australia’s rich cultural diversity.
Multicultural library services are an important aspect of public library services. This prestigious award has been established to recognise and promote this importance.
The objectives of the award are to:
- To recognise the importance of multicultural library services
- To raise the profile of multicultural library services within the community
- To encourage excellence in the field of multicultural library services
- To acknowledge and celebrate excellence in the field by public library services across Queensland.
This Award has two categories and is proudly Sponsored by CAVAL. The Awards were presented by Marie Robineau and Steven Oliver. Congratulations to the winner!
Unfortunately, there were no applications for the under 35,000 population category. We know there are so many wonderful things happening across the state in the multicultural and indigenous sphere and the QPLA board challenges all those within the category to apply next year.
The winner of the Over 35,000 population category was:
Townsville CityLibraries | Welcoming Week 2024.
Townsville Citylibraries aims to support Townsville City Council’s adherence to the Welcoming Cities Standard. The objectives of this Standard include: actively engaging with migrant and refugee communities, planning culturally inclusive messaging and activities, engaging with networks and stakeholders to ensure they are welcoming and inclusive, and building social and cultural inclusion, economic engagement and civic participation.
Townsville Citylibraries have had a long-standing relationship with the Townsville Multicultural Support Group (TMSG) with clients and their families attending the libraries’ programs that support people from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds.
In the lead up to Welcoming Week in September 2024, Citylibraries staff, Homework Mentoring program attendees, and TMSG CAMS clients volunteered to share a message of welcome in a language other than English. The simple message ‘Welcome to the library’ was recorded in 19 different languages and collated into a video to play in our library branches. The video was also shared temporarily via our libraries’ social media channels.
By the end of 2024, the TMSG CAMS program coordinator stated that in 2025 she and TMSG aim to make the public library feel like a third home for its clients.
The Welcoming Week 2024 video was a great way for our patrons from the CALD community and Citylibraries staff to be proud about sharing their own languages in the welcoming spaces of our public libraries. Another wonderful outcome of recording and showing the video within libraries was the recognition of the number of languages that are spoken in our community.
