Turning away hundreds of young people in need each year

Young people need specialist youth focused responses when they are facing homelessness. One of the biggest concerns is the amount of young people we turn away due to insufficient funding. In a 12-month period Project Youth will turn away 958 young people who need homelessness and housing support. This is the equivalent of a whole high school with no students.

Less than 10 per cent of young people facing homelessness are sleeping rough - the majority are couch surfing or are in unsafe and overcrowded accommodation. Youth homelessness is not a choice, the majority of young people facing homelessness is due to family violence, family breakdown, abuse and neglect.

Homelessness is not 'rooflessness'. We need a whole of community response. Everyone has a part to play in ending youth homelessness. We need to prevent it, ensure when it does occur it is brief and non-recurring. We need a stand-alone National Youth Homelessness Plan in Australia that focuses on the unique needs of young people. Focus creates funding and funding creates the potential for us to end youth homelessness.

Project Youth has been working in the community for more than 32 years, providing housing and homelessness support to young people. Homelessness doesn't always look the way we expect it to. Sometimes, it's hidden in the shadows in our community. Every young person deserves a safe place to call home.

Youth homelessness is not an insurmountable problem. It's something that we can solve together. As a community, we have the power to make a difference. This could be sharing social media posts, signing homelessness petitions, discussing with your family and friends to reduce stigma, learning about the reasons for youth homelessness, advocate to your MP for increased funding, donating to a homelessness charity, attending events, and offering employment opportunities to young people.

At Project Youth we provide housing and homelessness support to young people 12-24 years old. We provide 76 beds across Sutherland Shire, Georges River and Bayside including two crisis refuges and a range of transitional housing options. In 2023, we provided 22,700 nights of accommodation to 141 young people with 90 per cent transitioning effectively with positive outcomes.

However, each year the problem of youth homelessness is increasing in our area. This year at Project Youth we will turn away almost 958 young people. These are young people that have reached out for support. Where we can't provide support directly, we will provide information, guidance and support to access other services, we also provide drop-in support one day per week, run by young people with lived experience, to support and advocate for young people who are in the youth housing system, in an attempt to fill the gap of increased demand.

We are consistently frustrated and saddened by the stories of young people who need support and cannot access safe housing with specialist wrap around support. Without safe and stable housing young people are faced with difficult decisions that no young person should ever have to make. This includes having to return to unsafe family situations, disruptions to their education, impacts on their mental health, losing connections to services, and and not being able to access employment, open bank accounts or receive Centrelink as they do not have an address to write down.

Recently a young person we were supporting told us about having to stay with an abusive partner rather than be homeless, another told us about having to quit their employment as they could not secure housing and were unable to shower, feed themselves or most importantly feel safe. One young person had to resort to couch surfing for 12 months before they were able to access a place in the youth housing system, and another had successfully transitioned to a private rental through the Rent Choice Youth program and was studying at university, only to lose their place due to increased rent, pricing them out of the Rent Choice Youth program. Being unable to find another property they were forced back into the homelessness system.

Positive stories of young people exiting homelessness are many and the resilience and strength of young people inspires us every day, however it is the many stories we don't hear due to the hidden nature of youth homelessness that is the crisis we are experiencing in the sector.

The lack of funding for evidenced based prevention and early intervention, and the limited number of youth housing options is making it difficult to end youth homelessness.

At a time when young people need nurturing, support from safe adults, and an environment that promotes connection and attachment, we are instead experiencing an increased demand for our services each year. Deepening this issue is the cost-of-living crisis, the lack of affordable and social housing to transition young people into, and the increased competition between services for the little funding that is available.

There is a solution. We can end youth homelessness through:

Too many charities including Project Youth need to expend a lot of energy and resources on fundraising, advocating, and petitioning for more services with an ongoing uncertainty for staff and young people about whether the services will be funded at the end of each contract round. An increase in funding to increase specialist youth homelessness provision means we can fill the gap and stop young people from churning through cycles of homelessness and disadvantage.

Every young person deserves a safe place to call home. Help us ensure that no young person is left behind in a high school we don't see.

- Jodie Darge is the Chief Executive of Project Youth.