5.1 Increasing participation in community life
2024-25 Budget Measures
$73.0 million
to support social cohesion and community harmony through Multicultural NSW, including:
$7.5 million
in 2024-25 for Supporting Community Language Services
$4.0 million
to expand the Government’s community resilience programs
$88.8 million
package for the NSW Office of Sport including $1.0 million for continuing women’s sport initiatives
The NSW Government is committed to a society that supports connections with family, friends, community and promotes diversity and culture. A society where people of all genders participate in and benefit from community life.
Women contribute significantly to community life through both formal volunteering roles, and unpaid caring for children, the sick, elderly and people with disabilities.123
‘Social production’ describes the value generated from social contributions, such as: volunteering and unpaid charity work, unpaid education and care of children and unpaid care of the sick, elderly, and people with disabilities.124 These contributions hold society together and are critical to social cohesion. Time-use survey data reveals that women spend more time on these activities,125 and when they are assigned value the significance of their economic contribution becomes clearer.
Australia’s social production has been estimated to be valued at $288 billion in 2021 and research identifies that women generate 66 per cent of this value.126
The NSW Government celebrates the achievements of women contributing to social cohesion across the State, through its NSW Women of the Year Awards. In 2024, 428 nominations were received for the Awards, surpassing the 387 received in 2023. Recognition is awarded across six categories, including NSW Community Hero, NSW Aboriginal Woman of the Year and NSW Regional Woman of the Year.
The NSW Government is committed to ensuring that places of worship are safe spaces. The Safe Places for Faith Communities Program is part of an existing $15.0 million program and election commitment, providing a $5.0 million grant to be shared across 103 communities and faith organisations. The program takes a resilience-based approach to safety, supporting prevention, preparedness and recovery measures at places where faith communities gather.
The NSW Government is committed to ensuring that women and girls can benefit from participating in community sporting life. Across NSW, the Level the Playing Field program has approved 26 grants or new and upgraded sports facilities, including amenities and lighting improvements. Based on information provided by successful applicants, the program is expected to increase participation among women and girls at the respective facilities by an average of 57 per cent.127
Applicants are required to provide an Equitable Access and Usage policy that demonstrates how they will effectively drive gender equitable access and use of community sports infrastructure to improve outcomes for women and girls in addition to facility designs that meet universal design standards. This will encourage participation and gender equality.
The NSW Government is providing an $88.8 million package for the NSW Office of Sport to support grassroots sports in new communities, including delivering women’s sport initiatives.
This Budget invests $73.0 million in a set of programs that support multicultural communities in NSW. The programs include interpreting and translation services and job-readiness, frontline community responders, development of an anti-racism strategy, capacity building to support social cohesion and community harmony, and support to newly arrived migrants and refugees.
Gender impact assessment case study: Supporting community language services
The gender impact assessment identified that women from migrant and refugee backgrounds with limited English language skills face barriers in accessing government services. Inaccessibility of services is compounded by the intersectional disadvantage these women face.
Intersectionality refers to the ways in which different aspects of a person’s identity, for example race and gender, can expose them to amplified forms of disadvantage or advantage. It recognises that there are many facets to a person’s identity.
To address barriers to accessing government services, consideration will be given to the times that interpreter and translator training is run and community events are held to ensure accessibility for migrant and refugee women. A group of female interpreters and translators will be trained to better assist clients experiencing domestic and family violence. Working with funded community partners to improve gender disaggregated data collection at events, as well as improved data collection at Multicultural NSW training, was identified as an opportunity to support a greater understanding of who is accessing these activities.
This Budget measure will support more women to access interpreter and translator services to access jobs within this sector, and will work to better understand the gendered participation in training, social cohesion and community harmony activities.
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