The Gardiner Foundation has appointed Tank to lead a community listening program centred on culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) workers in Victoria’s Gippsland region; as part of a program of work co-funded and delivered in partnership with Agriculture Victoria.
The program, titled Accelerating Engagement of CALD Workforce in Agricultural Communities, represents a significant investment in understanding the lived experience of migrant and refugee workers across Gippsland’s dairy, horticulture and food processing industries; sectors that have long depended on CALD workers while struggling to retain them.
Gippsland’s agricultural workforce is changing. Communities from the Philippines, India, Myanmar, Samoa, and other parts of the world have quietly become essential to the region’s food supply chain, yet their voices have rarely shaped the systems that govern their working lives.
Our work will be looking at systemic barriers faced by CALD workers, barriers such as language, cultural isolation, unfamiliar onboarding processes, and a lack of community infrastructure.
Working in close collaboration with the Gardiner Foundation and The LOTE Agency, Tank will conduct on-location research across Leongatha, Sale and Maffra, listening to CALD agricultural workers and community members through culturally safe methods including in-person interviews, community meals, and group conversations. The engagement is designed to surface what standard surveys miss: the texture of daily experience, the unspoken hesitations, the small points of friction that compound into attrition.
“We believe change happens locally, through a relational approach,” stated Marita Davies, Research Lead and Community Storyteller at Tank. “This program is not about extracting data from communities but building the kind of trust that allows people to speak honestly about what they need, and ensuring those voices reach the decision-makers who can act on them.”
Tank brings over 25 years of experience in human-centred research and engagement across multicultural, First Nations, regional and government contexts. Having worked with institutions such as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations, Haven Home Safe, Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand, and Bendigo Community Health Services, among many others.
We recognise that agricultural communities in regional Victoria are doing extraordinary work and CALD workers are central to that. What we owe them is a genuine effort to understand what belonging looks like in their working lives, and to help design systems that support it.
For Gardiner Foundation, this investment reflects its broader mission to strengthen the long term prosperity of the Victorian dairy industry and its communities.
For Tank, it is one more iteration of a practice we have spent decades refining; listening first, designing with, and ensuring that the people closest to the issues are closest to the creation of the solution.
