[Sub ID 4703] Youth Friendly Whole Town Prototype (The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI))

Submission ID: 4703
Organisation name: The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI)
Contact name: Ms Lucy Fraser
Contact email: lucy.fraser@tacsi.org.au

Young students at risk of long-term unemployment

What need or issue are you trying to address?
Young Australians are a significant resource and Australia will need them to be innovative and entrepreneurial to create a better and stronger future as the population ages. (Lowe 2014)

Youth unemployment is one of the contributing risk factors to homelessness, and long-term welfare dependency.

Youth unemployment is often interlaced with other risk factors including family conflict or tension at home, having been in the care of the state and or the need to help contribute to the whole family income.

Youth unemployment not only has an impact on the economic wellbeing of a community but on mental health and wellbeing outcomes for young people in that community.

Knowing what opportunities are available to you or what you might be good at can be challenging and compounded if you have come from a family where the parents never worked and opportunities to work were never modelled.

We know that families with big stories are often over serviced, but many families and young people are completely under-serviced and have a tendency to slip through the cracks.

What is your idea?
‘Youth friendly’ whole-town prototype

Young people, local government, businesses, NGO’s and families take a collective impact approach to make a single town youth friendly, co-designed with TACSI. The status of being a ‘youth friendly’ town is a similar approach to the fair trade towns campaign, or to the child friendly towns in Leeds UK.

The prototype town will help define the ‘youth friendly’ status and explore what is required to truly be youth friendly as a community, leading the way for more youth friendly towns in Australia. This prototype focuses on a single geographic area, building a successful trial that can become a platform for scaling at fidelity.

‘Youth friendly’ activities to be tested include:

1. Co-designing with young people
2. Supporting businesses to make a commitment to youth employment
3. Exploring the changing nature of work, co-designing new ways of working with businesses and young people
4. Creating a local youth friendly town, advisory board of young people
5. Highlighting youth achievement in the town
6. Young people running the town for a day
7. Attracting media coverage and popular support for the campaign to create a movement of ‘youth friendly’ towns in Australia.