Erfan Daliri
Author | Educator | Consultant
Born in India to Baha’i parents fleeing religious persecution in Iran, Erfan migrated to Australia with his parents in 1984. Erfan is now an author, educator, poet and social change consultant with a long and diverse career focused on contributing to a better world, weaving together participatory community development and professional development training, performing arts, advocacy and academia.
Over the last 25 years Erfan has initiated and worked on hundreds of projects, campaigns and events across multiple countries related to social cohesion, racial equity, gender equality, human rights advocacy, climate action, First Nations cultural preservation, youth empowerment, multicultural affairs, and socioeconomic justice.
Erfan has a Master’s Degree in Communication for Social Change, with a thesis on the counterproductive influence of certain climate action communication, he has written three published books, released an album, and is one of Australia’s most sought after speakers on anti-racism, social cohesion and systems thinking for social change.
Erfan is currently the CEO of Kind Enterprises, a social change consulting firm that provides coaching, training and strategic advice to government departments, universities, corporations and not—for-profits across the country in the areas of race unity, equity, social justice and cohesion.
He is also the founder and director of Newkind Social Justice Conference, and Founding Board Member of the Centre for Social Equity.
The Back Story
Born in India to Baha’i parents who were fleeing religious persecution in Iran, Erfan migrated to Australia with his parents in 1984. Erfan’s life trajectory cannot be fully appreciated without considering the role and influence of his hero, best friend and father, Dr Farvardin Daliri OAM. As a creative artist, a community development worker, festival director, eduator and staunch advocate for justice, equity and social cohesion, Erfan does what he does because of the example his father set. In their very first year in Australia, Dr Farvardin Daliri start the Devonport Cultural Festival, one of the countries first events of that kind back in 1985.
Spending the early years in Tasmania and Victoria, the family soon moved to Townsville, Queensland, where Dr Daliri took on the role of director of the Migrant Resource Centre while he continued his PhD on the inequity First Nations student faced in education.
Erfan followed in his father’s footsteps in this area of First Nations advocacy, participatory development and cultural activism, and began working in the settlement services sector as a youth engagement worker when barely out of high school himself. At 17 Erfan embarked on a year of volunteering service in Sydney, Fiji and India, and at 19 he embarked on his first national motivational speaking tour covering 14 cities across Australia.
25 years later Erfan still uses the power of the spoken word through performance poetry, public speaking and the facilitation of professional development training, to inspire and affect change.
In the early 2000s while studying Infomechatronic Engineering at QUT, Erfan continued working with his father on the Townsville Cultural Festival (1995-2022), and other community development, youth engagement, settlement services and Indigenous advocacy projects across Australia.
In 2008, Erfan took on the role of Managing Director of Tabarsi Community Consultancy where he worked on range of projects including; mental health research, support services for survivors of trauma and torture, program coordinator of the Youth Agents of Change residential camps, facilitator of cross-cultural communication training, coordination of Indigenous Arts and cultural projects and community-building initiatives with newly arrived Australians.
In 2010 Erfan started his Master's in Communication for Social Change at the University of Queensland while still working with rural and remote communities in across Queensland, and in 2011 Erfan took on the role of Festival Director of the Townsville Cultural Festival, which became one of the country’s largest cultural festivals hosting 50,000+ participants over 5 days.
Erfan didn’t just grow the event, he broke the mold of what a “Cultural” Festival should look like, eliminating the boundary between so-called mainstream arts and folk festival and so-called “multicultural” events.
Between 2012 to 2015, Erfan moved his focus to writing and performing poetry, published his first book and releasing an album. In a few short years, Erfan performed at the Woodford Folk Festival, the Parliament House of Australia, and Ronnie Scots Jazz Club London, and booked a 20-date tour of the UK.
In 2016 Erfan launched Newkind as a mechanism for social change empowerment. Without funding or auspicing, he managed to successfully host the first Newkind Festival as a week long Zero-Waste, Plant-Based, Renewable Energy Only, Alcohol-Free conference for social change, which attracted hundreds of participants from across the globe. Attracting over a million page views in its first year, the Newkind brand is now a well-recognised name, and in 2021 it moved from the Marion Bay Falls Festival site to being hosted by RMIT University, and the event now has a full time home at Breakwell Organic Farm, in Redbank, VIC.
Newkind Conference is now one of Australia’s most highly regarded social justice conferences and is recognised as a leader in social change discourse, bringing together the themes of socio-economic, environmental, gender and racial justice through a systems thinking lens.
In 2018 Erfan founded the social change consulting firm Kind Enterprises as a way to empower organisations that seek to create positive social change. Kind Enterprises has launched online systems thinking for social change courses, provided professional development training and consulting for some of Australia’s largest companies, NGOs and government departments and contributed to eco-system empowerment through various on-going initiaves.
Erfan is now regarded as one of Australia’s leading anti-racism educators and speakers, providing consulting and training to government departments, peak bodies, employers, universities and not-for-profits.
In other roles, Erfan has previously been a refugee campaign advisor to Amnesty International Australia, a board member of the Culturally Diverse Alliance of Tasmania, Fellow of the Post Growth Institute, and a Research Advisory Group member of Beyond Inclusion, and is now a founding board member of the Center for Social Equity.
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