Sharing lessons from overseas aid

The Red Cross Point Lonsdale Queenscliff Branch will welcome a highly credentialled guest speaker at its next event.

Red Cross Victoria Divisional Council chair, Dr Denis Dragovic, will share insights from his diverse professional career, which encompasses the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors.

Dr Dragovic has worked as a civil engineer on multi-million dollar construction projects, led humanitarian aid missions in several war zones, consulted with United Nations agencies, lectured at the University of Melbourne, directed corporate and philanthropic fundraising at Australian Red Cross, and now sits on the federal government’s Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

“It is diverse, but it’s also got a consistent thread through it, and that is I’ve just had a fascination with different cultures, so that’s what’s taking me overseas for nearly two decades – a decade working in war zones around the world, but also a decade in academia and working as an engineer,” he said.

“So for me, it’s that just interest in seeing different places, talking to different people and learning about them.

“With the job I currently have on the tribunal, I focus on refugee appeals and so that gives an opportunity to speak with people who are, again, from all over the world with varied experiences and it’s such a privilege.”

Dr Dragovic’s talk will cover the lessons learned from his experiences as an aid worker in the field, some of which are included in his 2018 book No Dancing, No Dancing: Inside the Global Humanitarian Crisis.

“To be frank, the lessons to come back are those that only Red Cross seems to be structured around or has adopted,” he said.

“For example, a lot of the aid that we do – as an Australian government, an American government, in Iraq or Afghanistan, these sorts of places – was all about building stuff. It was all about counting and measuring things; how many roads, how many kilometers of roads, how many schools were built, and it was all about money.

“At the end of the day when I went back to these places where I used to work, not a lot of that was lasting. It’s not sustainable.”

What mattered more, he said, were the people aid workers had engaged with.

“Because then they had that exposure to transparency in leadership and management. They had exposure to humanitarian principles,” he said.

“They had exposure to democracy at a lower institutional level where the hierarchy is flatter, and all of these things then continue on.”

The talk will fall on World Red Cross Day and Would Red Crescent Day, which commemorates the birthday of founder Henry Dunant.

Dr Dragovic said no other international movement brought together people from 183 countries.

“In every one of those countries there’s a national society – same as there is in Australia – that adheres to the same values and principles, we’d call them, and then globally coming together to advocate for those principles of humanity,” he said.

“There’s no other organisation globally that does that and has a special place in international law and it has a responsibility to Geneva conventions when it comes to humanitarian and access through war but also how wars are conducted.”

The event will take place at the Queenscliff-Point Lonsdale RSL on 8 May from 1-2pm.

To purchase tickets, head to trybooking.com