PROJECTS
Take a Look
Improving School Attendance
Engaging children in school doesn’t just give them the opportunity to be educated, it keeps them occupied and off the streets. It teaches social and emotional regulation skills. It gives exposure to multiple mentors which is invaluable. It helps children build confidence to be a part of the wider community and provides access to healthy food and other resources. The activities we offer extend on and reinforce this.
Children who do not have the privilege of being educated will face many barriers throughout their life. If you cannot read, write or do basic mathematics you will be set up for a lifetime of relying on supports. It will be a struggle to communicate, get a drivers licence, read the instructions on your medication, gain employment, read contracts and important documents, read signs, budget money and pay for items.
There are hundreds of children not attending school in this town. There are many children reaching the end of primary school who are still at prep level, without basic literacy and numeracy skills and disconnected from society. This often leads to a life of crime, unemployment and poverty.
There are many reasons that children don't go to school. Some of these children come from families who are struggling with addiction to alcohol or serious chronic health conditions. Many families in the community struggle financially to provide for their children due to a lack of education, skills and confidence to gain employment.
Some families desperately want their children to attend school and put in the effort, however they lack the skills to support this. Often these parents just don’t want to see their children upset when they resist school and therefore keep them home. Most people in our community do not have a drivers licence or access to a vehicle and there is a lack of public transport in Mount Isa. Some children have had one or both parents incarcerated or missing. Many families are homeless and moving from house to house due to the current housing crisis.
We have recognised that some families in our community require intensive support to get their children to school. We understand that it is the parent's responsibility and we work with them to the best of their ability. We cannot however sacrifice the childrens education opportunities where assistance is needed, if we want to break the cycle in this generation.
We undertook a pilot project that has worked on a local scale. This program started in week 4 of term 1 and ran for 12 weeks.
With the community's help in the form of donations, we provided transport, food, uniforms, school bags, lunch boxes, shoes, clothes, support and anything children need to get them back to school. We also provided diversionary activities, “reward days” and access to sporting activities for all of the children with good attendance and improved behaviour.
By the end of the 12 week program we had the following results…
9 young people enrolled and still regularly attending.
4 young people with attendance below 30% regularly attending.
3 enrolment applications in waiting for an interview.
1 young person enrolled and attended regularly then dropped out. (He has come back to us now)
15 young people regularly attending reward days to keep their motivation and attendance up.
After 8 months we were working with 28 children and young people. 19 of these children were enrolled into school by us and 21 of the 28 continued attending school regularly with support.
These children are deserving of a chance to have an enriched life which in turn gives them the opportunity to give back.
Reducing Youth Crime
It's no secret that the rate of crime is through the roof in Mount Isa. There is a huge over-representation of Indigenous children in youth detention centers and in child safety and Mount Isa has the highest rate of domestic violence in QLD.
The children have communicated to us that the primary reason they are engaging in crime is due to boredom.
Our children were not going to school and the activities provided from local services could not keep the high number of children disengaged from school occupied and engaged in safe and healthy activities.
In our culture, the community brings up our children which has many advantages including access to more support, closer connections to family and culture and the children enjoy a fun life spending time together in large groups, often playing football, basketball and swimming in the river. Our children love to be outside, they can be very energetic and in the days before European settlement they would traditionally be walking long distances, hunting and gathering food, learning culture and bush skills.
We have recognised that there are some difficulties for our families adjusting to this way of life in today's society. Much of our Kalkatungu culture was stolen, leaving our people with a loss of identity, spiritual direction and purpose. With children walking around in large groups it becomes difficult to supervise them in our traditional way. Walking around at socialising at night is common to avoid the Mount Isa heat.
Many parents and carers lack education and therefore employment, which makes it difficult to model the importance of education and work ethic to children. To many families, the task of maintaining routine is very difficult and there is a lack of parenting skills as these adults were raised the same way.
Our school engagement program that began on 1 Feb 2022 included intensive support to get all of our children back to school. The children were motivated to go to school by the provision of reward days at the end of the week for good attendance. During the intensive 12 week pilot program, support to attend sporting activities was also provided.
During this period, every child that was previously engaged in crime had stopped engaging in crime. There was a 4 week break following this and it didn't take long for some of the children to go back to the streets and engaging in crime again. We continued to provide support to get them to school and reward days following this for another 4 months and we found that all of the children actively engaged in the program ceased all engagement in crime.
When the children are occupied, have multiple mentors, feel safe and their basic needs are being met, the crime rate drops significantly. The children have been happier and healthier than ever before.
This proves our theory that children do not need harsher punishments. They need love, support and to feel safe.
The cost of continuing this program in our community at its full capacity and extending the program to other areas of town would be significant. However, it would be significantly less than the cost of repairing the damage caused to people and property, children in the care of child safety, a lifetime in the criminal justice system, a lifetime of reliance on Centrelink and government housing, and the increase in the cost of healthcare for individuals living under the poverty line. When you add those same costs to the generations that will follow, it is clear that intensive support for our younger generations, where their parents or carers lack the skills to break this cycle is a viable investment.
We believe that prevention, from a young age, will be more successful than services providing support at the end stages of children displaying anti-social behaviour, when these habits and behaviours are deeply ingrained and very difficult to reverse.
We are committed to doing our best to keep our young people off the streets, engaged in healthy and safe activities and most importantly, keeping them happy.
Drivers Licence Program
In 2022 we have held regular community meetings to discuss the barriers our mob face in becoming independent and productive members of society. Through these discussions, we discovered that out of the approximately 100 people that live in this small community, only 2 people had a valid open drivers licence. The community had become reliant on local services and taxis to drive them around.
Not having a drivers licence or a car in Mount Isa when the summer months regularly reach temperatures above 40 degrees is challenging. It makes it difficult to find jobs, get children to school, do shopping and attend appointments, especially when you have a family with young children.
The barriers to getting a licence have been struggling to read and write to complete the written test, difficulty paying for licences and driving lessons, lack of access to people within their family and community to teach them to drive and the biggest barrier being the fear of learning to drive and lacking confidence.
The young people have no one to teach them and so they were stealing cars and teaching themselves to drive, with no training or awareness of road rules and safety. During the process of providing driving lessons, we found most people start driving automatic cars with both their left and right foot as they have taught themselves.
Our mob have been advised that driving lessons will be provided to them on the condition that they only drive with a licence and with a licenced instructor. That privilege is revoked if they begin stealing cars. Support has been provided to obtain learners licences and access to lessons.
The Yallambee community have committed to making our mob independent and this is a crucial part of that process.
Improving Health, Safety & Quality of Life
Health
The community have recognised a need to improve the health of our mob. There will be a focus on hair, skin, teeth for the children and adults this year in 2023 and then a commitment to maintain a good standard of health moving forward.
Alcoholism is an exteremly difficult issue tackle as the rate of our mob with severe addiction to alcohol is high. We will continue to encourage and support our families to live a healthier and happier life, hopefully leading to longer lives.
Mental health is something that is rarely discussed and addressed in our community. In the coming year we will be bringing that topic up more regularly and work towards addressing our mobs emotional needs.
Safety
The Yallambee community are engaged in regular discussions on how we can improve the safety of our mob.
The children have been attending regular supervised swimmimg lessons as the importance of knowing how to swim has been highlighted, especially as there is a river close by that the children can access at the back of Yallambee.
Regular discussions have also been taking place around reducing suicide and early death among our mob and the impact that drugs and alcohol have on these issues as well as on violence in the community.
We want the Yallambee community to be a safe place for our residents and our visitors.
Quality of Life
We recognise that there is more to life than just meeting our basic needs and feeling safe. When your basic needs arent being met and your safety is at risk, it can be very difficult to focus on anything else in your life.
We hope that by improving these things we can start addressing our mobs emotional needs, spiritual needs and the need to find joy and happiness in our lives doing safe and healthy recreational activities.
Our aim is to continue keeping the children engaged in fun activities, focus on bringing more culture back into the community and acquire a bus and 4WD so that we can take our mob out on cultural and recreational activities.
Improving Our Community
We have been working on making our community a nicer place to visit and live. We now have regular clean-up days and the children are slowly learning to throw their rubbish in the bin and clean up after themselves.
In 2022 we finished a project that was previously started with the help of other organisations. We planted fruit trees in tyres that we painted in the street. We plant them in tyres as we have pets that roam free within our community and this helps to protect the plants. When you drive past you may also notice painted tyres on the fences. We want the community to know that we are happy people who like bright colours. In these tyres, we plan to grow flowers and vines that will grow along the fences. Our mob is doing our very best to share the responsibility of keeping these plants alive. Sometimes accidents happen and they get damaged by people and animals, so it will be a constant work in progress, but it keeps us active and we love it.
We have big plans to keep beautifying this place that is very special to us. Watch this space to see what we can achieve.
Local Enterprise
Setting the foundation
Getting jobs is something that is high on our priority list. Making sure that our children continue getting educated will support this.We will also be sourcing training opportunities for our mob to increase our skills and experience.
Some of us are ready to go and are already working but some of us need a little bit more support. We will be working towards using the multitude of skills we already have to create jobs and businesses within our community, to give us a chance to build up our confidence.
Recycling
Currently our mob are recycling cans and bottles for money to go back into benefiting the community. Every little bit counts!