Bilingual Weeds workshops

Is your Council interested in spreading the word on weeds to culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) community groups in your area?

As part of the Sydney Metropolitan Weeds Education Project, funded by NHT and supported by the SMCMA, bilingual weeds workshops have been developed by the Sydney Weeds Committees together with a team of bilingual sustainability educators from the Ethnic Communities Living Sustainably Project - a joint project between the NSW Department of Environment & Climate Change and the NSW Ethnic Communities Council.

Workshops are available in Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Italian, Greek, Spanish, Arabic and Macedonian. Councils need to provide a venue (preferably including an outdoor weedy location), samples of local weeds, a council environmental education, noxious weeds or bushcare officer, and pay for a few hours time of the bilingual educator in the language you wish the workshop to be presented in.

How to hold a bilingual weeds workshop.

Community groups who are interested in participating in this program are also most welcome to become involved and are encouraged to approach the weeds officer or environmental education officer at their local council to organise a workshop.  

The bilingual sustainability educators are experienced in presenting environmental education to their community groups and have already participated in an intensive one-day workshop and bus tour of some of Sydney 's weedy places, held in March 2007. At this workshop, they were introduced to a number of weeds common to Sydney found in bushland reserves, urban parks and residential gardens. They saw first-hand how easily weeds can escape from the garden, and the damaging effects of weeds on our environment. At each site visited, the bilingual educators met with council weeds officers, and also learned how to identify these common weeds, how weeds spread and basic weed control methods.