Still waiting for your turn?
If you are one of the thousands of people who have registered to participate or host a Welcome Dinner, you may be wondering why you haven’t had a turn yet. In the past year alone, we have doubled the number of dinners (and lunches) held and we are about to reach the incredible milestone of our 200th Welcome Dinner. Every Welcome Dinner takes an average 10 hours of coordination work, primarily done by volunteers. If we have not yet managed to find or appoint a Coordinator in your area, then we probably haven’t had any dinners there yet and since we try to match people up locally, you may not have been invited to one in another area. However, you should be receiving our quarterly newsletter and invitations to larger Community Welcome Dinners when they occur. If you are waiting to host, you can attend as a participant for now. One of our challenges is that in some areas we have a long waiting list and in other areas we haven’t yet found hosts. We are also always seeking more help to invite newly arrived people to take part and much of our time is spent getting out into our local communities to connect with newly arrived people – please assist us with this if you can!


Fairfield Public School Community Welcome Dinner
For our last Community Welcome Dinner in March we held a truly fantastic Community Welcome Dinner at Fairlfield Primary School in partnership with St Vincent De Paul Society’s SPARK Program, and Fairfield Public School. The entire group of families, children,...

Ultimo Community Welcome Dinner
In late March the Welcome Dinner Project team hosted a fantastic Community Welcome Dinner at the Ultimo Community Center on a cold and windy Thursday evening. Despite the wet weather, over 70 City of Sydney residents were warmly welcomed by our facilitators for a...

Liverpool Community Welcome Dinner at Casula Powerhouse
In March we had a huge Community Welcome Dinner at the Casula Powerhouse Museum. Despite some minor setbacks with the trains not running to Casula Station right before the Dinner, the evening kicked off to a great start, with around 130 attendees, including heaps of...

The Welcome Dinner Project launch on the NSW Central Coast!
What a fantastic start to The Welcome Dinner Project on the NSW Central Coast. Upon arrival, the guests were carefully directed to the back of the second floor of the library where the event was due to start within the next few minutes. Aunty Bronwyn, a representative...
Smashing stereotypes: Sharing Welcome Dinner Project stories
Since 2014, hundreds of newly arrived and established Victorians have shared their homes, their food and their stories as part of the Welcome Dinner Project. On Sunday 12 February we ran a story sharing event where guests who had attended one or more Welcome...

Home Dinners and other activities in Brisbane
In the second half of 2016 we held three home Welcome Dinners and attended numerous festivals and workshops to raise awareness about the project. In the process we made some incredible connections: 10 June - Our work with Digital Storytellers began in June at the...