Anti-Racism Community Collective

Free and equal in dignity and rights

An alliance of community groups and leaders across faiths, cultures and backgrounds, working together against racism in all its forms.

Who we are

The Collective brings together community leaders, organisations and faith groups, and allies from the wider community, to respond to racism together rather than one community at a time.

The National Anti-Racism Framework, released by the Australian Human Rights Commission in November 2024, gives Australia a roadmap for ending racism. It was built on years of community consultation. Government implementation may take time, and communities experiencing racism can’t afford to wait.

The Collective is a community-led response. It puts the Framework’s recommendations into practice now, while advocating for governments to adopt and fund the Framework in full.

The Collective sees itself as a bridge: connecting what communities experience on the ground with policy and systemic change, and showing what community-led anti-racism looks like in practice.

As governments fund the Framework, the Collective intends to hand its support work to properly resourced services, while keeping its advocacy and accountability role.

What we do

The Collective’s work has three parts.

  1. Community dialogue and skills

    Town halls open to everyone, on shared issues such as housing, the cost of living and safety, alongside the harder questions of inclusion and interfaith respect. Practical training in safe bystander intervention, knowing your rights when reporting racism, and media and political literacy.

  2. One voice to government

    Community leaders across organisations, faith groups and allied communities speaking together for urgent, funded implementation of the National Anti-Racism Framework; an equitable government response to all forms of racism; investment in community-led solutions; better data on racist incidents, including for communities with no reporting register of their own; and cultural safety across government services.

  3. One voice to the media

    Coordinated, strengths-based public engagement that presents racism as an issue for all of society, not a minority issue. This includes media training for community spokespeople and working with journalists committed to responsible race reporting.

The Model Anti-Racism Strategy. Members of the Collective developed the Model Anti-Racism Strategy for Local Government, a free template that any Australian council can adapt and adopt.

Our Charter

Members of the Collective sign a short Charter that sets out its foundations, values and commitments.

Our foundations

  • The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948): all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
  • The Freedom Charter (1955): a nation belongs to all who live in it.
  • The spirit of Bandung (1955), where the peoples of Asia and Africa first stood together against colonialism and racial hierarchy.
  • The Durban Declaration (2001), the world’s most comprehensive framework for confronting racism, xenophobia and related intolerance.
  • The Uluru Statement from the Heart (2017), which invites all Australians to walk together toward a better future grounded in truth-telling and justice for First Peoples.

Our values

  • Solidarity across faith, culture, language and origin, and the particular solidarity owed to First Nations peoples.
  • Dignity over deficit, strength-based storytelling, and speaking of one another as whole.
  • Truth spoken plainly, listening before leading, and building bridges wide enough for those who once stood apart.
  • Racism is not a minority issue but a shared human wound, and its healing is the work of all of us.

Our commitments

As members of this Collective, we commit:

  • To centering the voices of those with lived experience of racism, and never to speak over them.
  • To acting in solidarity with First Nations justice, understanding it as distinct from, yet inseparable from, our shared cause.
  • To confronting racism in all its forms, refusing to trade one community’s safety for another’s.
  • To holding ourselves to honesty, humility and accountability, and to repair harm when we cause it.
  • To extending solidarity, even when our own community is not directly under attack, and use our experience with racialisation, colonisation, or expertise to be a genuine ally.

We are not waiting for permission to be equal. We are already, and always have been, free and equal in dignity and rights.

Read the Charter PDF, 290 KB

The full Charter, with its Acknowledgement of Country and sources.

First Nations peoples

The Collective acknowledges the distinct and sovereign status of First Nations peoples as the Traditional Owners of this land, and recognises that anti-racism in Australia must be informed by the ongoing impacts of colonisation, dispossession and structural inequality.

Racism against migrant and multicultural communities and First Nations justice are distinct and need separate policy responses. The Collective commits to working in solidarity with First Nations communities, to embedding truth-telling, self-determination and cultural safety in its work, and to seeking ongoing guidance from First Nations-led organisations.

Steering Committee

  • Maria (Polly) Cutmore

    Polly is a Gomeroi Elder who was born and grew up in Moree in northern New South Wales. For many years she has been a fierce and tireless activist for her Country, community and culture, spearheading campaigns on issues such as the protection of Gomeroi sacred sites and the environmental impacts of mining. A direct descendant of the Weraerai clan, members of which were murdered in the Waterloo Creek and Myall Creek massacres of the late 1830s, she is also a leading advocate for truth-telling about these atrocities.

  • Inaz Janif

    Inaz is a secondary school teacher, human rights advocate and community leader with extensive experience advancing social justice and addressing Islamophobia, racism and discrimination in Australia. She has held leadership and advocacy roles across the community sector, including as an Executive Member of the Islamic Council of Victoria and the Australian Muslim Centre for Human Rights, leading and contributing to policy advocacy, public education, community engagement and strategic initiatives. A respected writer and public speaker, she has contributed to national conversations on human rights, discrimination and social cohesion, with her work featured in The Age, ABC and SBS.

  • Dr Sukhmani Khorana

    Sukhmani is a Scientia Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Media at UNSW and a Co-Director of the UNSW Media Futures Hub. She has published extensively on migrant media, teaches a course on race and media, and is currently working on online racism and anti-racism.

  • Dr David Glanz

    David is a member of Anti-Zionism Australia, of Free Palestine Melbourne and of Jews for a Free Palestine in Naarm/Melbourne, and a supporter of the Jewish Council of Australia. In Britain in the 1970s he took part in the Anti-Nazi League, a hugely successful campaign that broke the back of the then dominant Nazi group, the National Front. In Melbourne, he was central to the campaign to drive the Nazi group National Action out of the city. More recently, he has helped defend rallies of refugees and anti-racists from the National Socialist Network. He is also actively involved with the Refugee Action Collective, Victoria.

  • Gurinder Kaur JP

    Gurinder is a Melbourne-based community leader, multicultural advocate and Justice of the Peace known for her extensive social impact work in the City of Whittlesea. She is President of Sikh Community Connections, focusing on inclusion and wellbeing, and the first Sikh President of the Whittlesea Interfaith Network. She is an active leader in family violence prevention, senior wellbeing and youth empowerment. She received the 2023 Victorian Multicultural Award for Excellence, is a Victorian Honour Roll of Women inductee and is a Sikh Women Award recipient.

  • Nour Salman

    Nour is the Anti-Palestinian Racism Project Lead at APAN. She is a seasoned geopolitical analyst and communications professional, with a history of using open-source intelligence and analysis techniques to interpret complex events and security developments in the SWANA region. Passionate about social justice and care, she is an active member of and advocate in the Palestinian community.

  • Associate Professor Mario Peucker

    Mario is an academic at Victoria University with over 20 years of experience researching racism and anti-racism, community activism and citizenship, and far-right political movements, in Europe and Australia. Since 2019 he has led community engagement and place-based research projects across Victoria, including his current project with the City of Melbourne, building anti-racism support and reporting pathways tailored to community needs (‘third-party reporting’). This work has established three local anti-racism support networks operating across five local government areas in Melbourne. Mario coordinates the Victorian Alliance of Anti-Racism Support Networks and the website Speaking Out Against Racism, and since 2024 has run more than 40 anti-racism trainings that strengthen community capacity to speak out about and report racism.

  • Ohad Kozminsky

    Ohad is the Community Engagement Director for the Jewish Council of Australia. He also teaches students from a range of faith and cultural backgrounds at a secondary school in Melbourne. He is an elected member of the AEU Victoria Branch Council and the AEU Maribyrnong region. Ohad is of Arab-Jewish and European-Jewish heritage.

  • Rev Dr Manas Ghosh

    Manas is a respected pastor in the Uniting Church and a faith leader and scholar, with a deep understanding of the world’s diverse religious traditions. He is committed to creating a more harmonious and peaceful world for all.

  • Deepak Joshi

    Deepak is a co-founder of Hindus for Human Rights ANZ, co-founder of The Humanism Project, and Executive Director at NRI Affairs. The Humanism Project’s advocacy successfully engaged with the Australian Human Rights Commission to include caste discrimination in the National Anti-Racism Framework, and in the anti-discrimination policies of the Cities of Monash and Melbourne. He brings deep experience in coalition building, grassroots mobilisation, and strategic partnerships with progressive, environmental and social justice organisations. His work centres secular humanist perspectives within the diaspora while building bridges across diverse communities.

  • Nandini Sen Mehra

    Nandini is a board member of The Humanism Project and of Multicultural Community Connect, Queensland; Co-Chair of the women’s wing of GOPIO International (Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin); Culture Editor at NRI Affairs; and Regional Communications and Policy Director for Hindus for Human Rights ANZ. Her work centres inter-community bridge building and dialogue. A published author (Penguin Random House, Amaryllis) and award-winning poet, she hosts “Pause with Nandini” on NRI Affairs, a show featuring change makers who are a force for good.

Contact

To get in touch with the Collective, email [email protected].