A Greek Australian is making it her mission to give migrants, refugees and asylum seekers a chance to realise their entrepreneurial dreams.

“We are trying to give the opportunity to the new immigrants to create their own successful stories”

Violet Roumeliotis, chief executive of Settlement Services International (SSI), is the founder of Ignite, a program helping newly-arrived Australians start their own businesses.

Based in Sydney, SSI is a not-for-profit company funded by the Department of Immigration, and currently supports up to 8,000 people across New South Wales.

“Almost all of them are people who arrived in Australia in boats,” Ms Roumeliotis tells Neos Kosmos.

“They are very enterprising people; they want to have their own business and they are quite capable of doing it. That’s the reason we started up Ignite.”

And so far the program has helped create close to 30 new businesses.

In a report recently published by the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), the outcomes of the Ignite small business initiative were examined, with the results showing that participation in such programs significantly increased the refugee’s chance of success.
Researchers found that a lack of local contacts and knowledge can be significant hurdles for budding entrepreneurs, particularly if they come from a refugee background.

Professor Jock Collins, from the UTS business school, says refugees face the greatest barriers when it comes to starting a business, but business incubators focused on new Australians are beginning to change that.

“While we take refugees because of our humanitarian commitments and responsibilities, we also benefit significantly as a nation in terms of the way in which refugees help to build our society and economy,” Professor Collins says.

Recently published data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows humanitarian migrants have the highest rate of business ownership among recent migrants to Australia, which is were Ignite comes in.
“We are predominantly a multicultural organisation assisting refugees and asylum seekers, but we also work with people with disabilities and kids in foster care,” says Ms Roumeliotis.

“With the refugees and asylum seekers, the majority of people we assist are mainly from Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. They are usually large families with maybe three or four children.”

The children in foster care are predominantly from Vietnam, Turkey, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Arabic countries, along with a smaller number of Greek background.

Ms Roumeliotis has been assisting newcomers for some 30 years, and is inspired by her own family story.

Both her parents came to Australia in the 1950s from the Greek island of Chios, when she says “there weren’t settlement services to support immigrants”.

“They worked very hard, like a lot of their generation. These people never met their full potential because they weren’t able to learn English, or they didn’t have the support they needed. We are trying now to give the same opportunity to the new immigrants to create their own successful stories.”

To read more on Settlement Services International, visit www.ssi.org.au