**Join ShantiWorks & Wellsprings for Women on the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination for a Social Justice Gathering with Shankari Chandran Exploring Racism in Australia in 2024**

Wellsprings for Women collectively with ShantiWorks, invite you to attend a special event with author and social justice lawyer, Shankari Chandran on the 21st of March 2024 —The International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Australia is the only country in the world that has renamed this day to Harmony Day. In doing so, the roots of this day becomes sanitised. Globally, the 21st of March is known as the International Day of Racial Discrimination as declared by the United Nations in 1966. Please join us as we explore the realities of racism in White Australia in 2024 and how people of colour/migrants find collective, community strengths and resistances as they manage interpersonal, institutional, and systemic racial injustices. Then there will be a special opportunity for people of colour to join Shankari for an intimate conversation about connections and disconnections to homelands. Through Shankari’s words and writing, together we will grapple with ideas of home, identity, belonging, the pain and joy of bridging gaps between cultures, navigating the loss and sadness of dispossession, injustice, and the beauty of creating and finding community in new places.

Copies of Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens will be available for purchase.

The Details:

10am - Arrival & Welcome
10:20am - Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens Reading & Reflection by Shankari Chandran
11am - Panel Discussion with Anu, Shankari & Shankar followed by Q&A
12pm - Lunch & Networking *Catering by social enterprise Cultural Cuisines

***1pm-2pm - PLUS a special opportunity – conversation circle for those from communities of colour
Please note: attendance will be capped at the first 30 registrations for this element of the event

Our Panellists

Shankari Chandran is an Australian Tamil lawyer and author of Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, Song of the Sun God and The Barrier. Shankari has spent two decades working as a lawyer in the social justice field, on national and international program design and delivery. She continues her work in social impact for an Australian national retailer. She is based in Sydney, Australia, where she lives with her husband and her four children and explores dispossession and the creation of community through her fiction. Shankari Chandran is an Australian Tamil lawyer, and author based in Sydney, Australia. She has authored The Barrier, The Song of the Sun God and Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens which won the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Shankari uses her writing to explore injustice, dispossession, and the creation of community, to bring forward stories that often lay hidden and uncovered. Her latest novel Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is about family and memory, community and race, an exploration of what it means to be Australian and who gets to decide this. Shankari describes it as a novel about the stories people tell themselves and each other to keep their memories and cultures alive.

Anu Krishnan has lived, laughed, loved and cried in 5 very different countries. She has a background in Social Anthropology, Social Work, Applied Psychology and Social Research and has worked with government, community and education sectors to design programs and implement strategies for domestic violence prevention, resilience, engagement and community development. With a deep interest in building resilient communities, Anu works with organizations and people who share the same passion and drive to bring change. She has developed and delivered both capacity building and therapeutic group programs to enable people to build a deeper understanding of their strengths, identify and overcome their challenges and actualize their vision. She has worked with a diverse range of clients including Victoria Police, DFFH, Judicial College of Victoria, Burnet Institute, AMES Australia, Commission for Children and Young People, Salvation Army and several others to bring better outcomes for families impacted by violence and supporting change within our communities. In 2019 Anu was a recipient of the Community Innovation Award at the Victorian Multicultural Commission’s Multicultural Awards Program for her flagship Prevention of Violence against Women leadership program.

Shankar Kasynathan is a movement builder advocating for human rights and migrant and refugee communities, who has worked with Amnesty International, Oxfam, Red Cross and VicHealth and has just finished his tenure as a Victorian Multicultural Commissioner. He is currently the leader of Federation University’s ‘Roads to Reconciliation’ project as an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at their National Centre for Reconciliation, Truth, and Justice. Over the past 20 years, Shankar has been seizing opportunities and tackling challenges in the Public Health, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs sectors across Victoria, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and the ACT. He is currently Deputy Chairperson at the The Migrant Workers Centre. He identifies as a Tamil Australian with ancestral roots in the Jaffna Peninsula, and currently lives in central Victoria.

We acknowledge that this event is taking place on stolen lands of the Kulin Nation and pay respect to Elders past and present.