Vulnerable young Australians – particular those leaving the child protection system – are often ill-equipped to find somewhere to leave, and experience high rates of homelessness.
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00:00Brooke Oliver says she lived in about ten residential foster and kinship care placements
00:06growing up.
00:07Oh, it was rough. It was moment to moment, you know, it was survival. We didn't have
00:11much of an option so we had to make do with what we had.
00:15She says she eventually became homeless.
00:18You felt less than everybody else, you know, going to school without a feed or going to
00:21school without a roof over your head and coming back to stressing out about where you're going
00:25to live or where you're going to sleep for that night. It's nothing that a seven year
00:29old should be worrying about.
00:30Now 27 years old and a peer worker in Adelaide, Brooke Oliver says there needs to be more
00:34support for vulnerable young people looking for housing, especially those exiting child
00:39protection systems.
00:40They think that we have the opportunities that everybody else has. We don't have those
00:44opportunities being a young person. We don't have the lived experience to be able to prove
00:48that we can go into private residences.
00:50The first time I experienced homelessness I was nine and then again as an adult I had
00:56to leave my family home.
00:58Tyler identifies as trans-masculine and says a lack of support meant they didn't know
01:01where to turn to for help.
01:03With exiting into homelessness I didn't have the resources or the skills to take care
01:08of myself, to access housing. Not that there was any available but even if there was I
01:14wouldn't have known how or where to access it.
01:17The Hometime National Campaign says about 38,000 unaccompanied young people aged 15
01:22to 17 experience homelessness in Australia each year. They've built Lego houses to
01:26represent the scale of need in SA and are now calling for action.
01:30So the Hometime Campaign is calling on state, territory and federal governments to invest
01:35and build up a dedicated youth housing system which includes 15,000 dedicated tenancies
01:40with the LINC support to help these young people heal and recover and thrive.
01:44The South Australian State Government says it funds five alliances responsible for providing
01:49youth homelessness supports. It says short and medium term options are available to young
01:53people in SA.
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