Royals leading the way

Royal Life Saving WA is proud to have won the Leadership Award at the 2018 Sport & Recreation Industry Awards. This award recognises sport and recreation organisations that have made significant progress toward and/or have improved opportunities and achieved outcomes that encourage leadership in the sport and recreation industry.

In Western Australia, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CaLD) communities are over-represented in drowning statistics with many new arrivals to WA having poor or non-existent swimming and water safety skills. For many of the 700,000 migrants living in our state the acquisition of swimming and water safety skills was not prevalent in their country of birth and sadly this is reflected in our drowning statistics.

For this reason, Royal Life Saving WA established a Multicultural Steering Committee to gather the collective knowledge of cultural groups including the Chung Wah Association, the Indian Society, settlement agencies including ISHAR and Communicare, as well as state and local government, to better understand the barriers, cultural understandings and adaptations needed to increase water safety skills and participation.

Our approach has been to foster shared leadership, distributed amongst the Steering Committee Members. Royal Life Saving facilitates the Steering Committee’s collective purpose, provides social support to committee members and organises opportunities for team learning. The benefit of this leadership approach has been greater engagement and activation by participating organisations, swift coordination and program innovation.

If you would like further information on the Multicultural Steering Committee, please click below.