What does safety look and feel like to you?

Imogen | Whakatū

Imogen describes how finding the Multicultural community created her first experience of true belonging – seeing herself reflected in diverse voices and being chosen as an equal.

“There was always this appreciation to the fact that I wasn’t from Sāmoa. That was where I was living and a place that I love. But that’s not who I am. That’s not my culture. And so when I moved back here to Nelson at the end of 2022, there was always this idea in my mind that coming back here, I would feel like I belonged, like how everyone in Sāmoa belonged and this would be my home because I was born here.

When I first moved here, I was treated as an immigrant, and that was a really shocking experience for me. And I think it ended with me carrying a lot of anger. It was like the little things of being looked at when no one else was looking at anyone else.

After about three months of living here, I found the Multicultural community. And that is the first time in my life where I felt safe and I felt like I belonged and I felt like all the input that I was giving was welcomed, and I felt heard. I’m both in the Multicultural Youth Group and I also am on the board at Cultural Conversations. And both of those experiences have given me so much as a person because it just means that I have a space.

For me, belonging is being able to look around you, at the people surrounding you and the voices that are being spoken and heard and seeing yourself reflected in them. And I mean, for a multicultural space, I’m not the same as my friends, everyone around me are from different ethnicities, but we are all equals. And for me, that is what belonging is. It’s putting up my hand and being chosen. For me that is belonging. Which is something I never had before.

I do so much work with the Multicultural Youth Group and that mostly is just about education. You have to teach people because if they never learn, they don’t know any different.

I think that was kind of my end of a lot of my anger was realising that actually, it’s not their fault. It’s a fault of the system. And I just hope that one day, a little mixed race girl can sit in a class and feel the same as everyone else. And it doesn’t have to be about her skin colour and it doesn’t have to be about her hair texture. It can just be about her and her ideas and her thoughts and who she is as a person.”