Our Troubled Youth – Some Answers

Matt Noffs is the co-founder – with his wife Naomi – of Sydney’s Street University with centres at Liverpool and Mount Druit. The grandson of Ted Noffs who set up Sydney Wayside Chapel in the 1960s, Matt sees hundreds of young people every week and his organisation is now expanding into Queensland helped by funding from the Queensland Government. On Tuesday 10 March 2015, Matt Noffs joined Wendy McCarthy AO, Chair of Headspace, Lane Hinchcliffe, Managing Director and Program Co-ordinator of Project 15 and David Cole, Founder of The Balanu Foundation, to speak on his experience of helping Australia’s troubled youth. The paper which follows is an edited transcript of Matt Noff’s address

OUR TROUBLED YOUTH – SOME ANSWERS

MATT NOFFS

Thank you Gerard and Anne for having me today. It is great to be in the company of Lane, David and Wendy. I’d also like to acknowledge Ros Luger who’s in the audience. Ros, along with her partner Milton pioneered the drug and alcohol field in Australia, along with my grandparents. Ros worked with both my parents and grandparents. So, thank you for being here Ros.

The Ted Noffs Foundation was started by my grandparents back in the 1960s as the Wayside Foundation, which of course was born from the Wayside Chapel. My grandparents, Ted and Margaret Noffs, also co-founded Lifeline in the Department of Aboriginal Affairs with Charlie Perkins’ Life Education Centre. Afterwards, my parents, Wesley and Amanda Noffs, turned the Wayside Foundation into the Ted Noffs Foundation in Ted’s honour.

My parents then started the first drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre for adolescents in Australia. Since that time, my wife Naomi and I have gone on to establish the Street Universities. By the end of this year, there will be seven Street Universities around the country – we are starting three in Queensland now, thanks to the Queensland Government.

I want to talk about a few different challenges Australia is facing at the moment and, more importantly, Australian young people. I’ll start with engagement. We see thousands of young people every year through all of our programs, both the rehabs and the Street Universities. It’s no easy task to get a young person through the door, as Wendy would attest to. It’s difficult finding the most marginalised young people. It’s difficult asking them into an environment where you can start to work with them. So, at the very beginning of working with a group of marginalised young people, the biggest challenge is getting them through the door. It’s the greatest challenge that services like ours, like Headspace, like the Ted Noffs foundation face. So we’re very happy that we see thousands of young people and we believe that we are incredibly successful at finding answers.

We’re also successful at triage, or finding a young person when they’re in that space, and allowing them then to find an employment service, or helping them see a counsellor – perhaps with one of our own clinicians or by referring them on to another service like Headspace, or other services out there. We also engage with them in a holistic manner, and in different ways. A young person might need a shelter for the night. Everyone would be familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. There’s no point talking about counselling until an individual has the most basic of necessities – a roof over a head, some food to eat.

Once those things have been dealt with, then we can talk about the other issues, such as drug and alcohol. The problem of drug and alcohol issues is one of the great challenges for young people in our nation at this time. Every single one of us knows someone with a drug and alcohol issue, if we don’t have one ourselves. And yet the drug and alcohol field is incredibly underfunded in our country. At the same time, we are pioneers in the world in terms of drug and alcohol. In spite of this, drug and alcohol, in the last 20 years across Australia, has seen much good work thanks to people like the Lugers, like Odyssey House, and people who work with us at the Ted Noffs foundation.

No two centres of ours are the same. We operate in a welcoming, youth-friendly manner. Unlike Headspace, which have very neat and tidy offices, ours are normally quite messy, at times filled with graffiti akin to the Wayside Chapel in the 1960s and 1970s, where people used to walk in and write all sorts of rude words on the wall. Where beatniks and hippies would come together and make a ruckus, where Ted held the first psychedelic disco in Australia – I don’t think he understood what “psychedelic” meant.

We continue that today. We hold block parties, bring people in, work with them, hold graffiti programs. I don’t like graffiti. And I don’t like tagging. But if I know that it will be effective in getting a young person through the door, I welcome it if it’s legal. In places like Liverpool, we’ve been responsible for reducing the graffiti problem because we have used a tactic just like that.

It’s important to listen to young people. You can be incredibly tokenistic about this, or you can ignore young people. You need to listen to young people and you need to understand where they’re coming from. You need to be able to understand what they’re talking about when they use words like “hip hop”. Naomi and I would leave the Street University some nights with our ears just absolutely deafened from listening to hip hop for a day. Yet it was one of the most important things in getting young people in. It is important to understand where a young person is coming from. And, young people have to have a sense of ownership around their space. And we hope to work with organisations like Headspace in the future, because it’s something that organisations like us are very good at.

But you need to have evidence to continue to do what you’re doing. My parents felt that what Ted was doing at the Wayside was very important, but they also felt that there was a new level of clinical expertise that was necessary. An expertise that would allow us to start working to address young people’s needs around drug and alcohol issues. So they developed, with the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, a basis of evidence, a monograph, to begin the first rehab.

Today we are in collaboration with the University of New South Wales and, through a federal government Australian Research Council grant, we’re investigating long term treatment outcomes. We are going back a decade to see what kind of impact we’ve had on young people’s lives. That is the kind of evidence we need before we can expand further.

In terms of drug use, we find that overall young people’s drug use does go down after seeing our counsellors. Over half the young people our schools counsellors see completely stop using drugs. We’ve found that, after a young person has left our rehab, criminality drops by a half. Crime against a person drops from 48.1 per cent to 17.1 per cent. Vandalism drops from 31.1 per cent to 7.9 per cent. Suicide ideation – something that’s come up a lot tonight with the previous speakers – drops after visiting our program from 41.9 per cent to 13.8 per cent.

This is the kind of evidence the programs need, in order to know they’re doing a good job. Our clients are disadvantaged, marginalised, socially disconnected. They’re all young people lacking what you and I take for granted: a family; a sense of meaning in your life; a good connection with education and a good connection with mentors outside the family. We work with these young people because they are the ones who are at the greatest risk of social isolation and they are the ones who end up costing society and the government the most money.

We value the mix of community and clinical services that we hold because you need both. Ted and Margaret were right when they started the Wayside, and so were my parents when they started bringing in the academics and psychologists. Today, having a certain level of clinical expertise is vital for our programs. But working with families, and working with the community, is also important. As Ted said, you hold the answers, do not always give away your authority to another who claims to have the answers. I certainly do not claim to have all the answers. There are things that we are very good at, but the community holds 90 per cent of the answers today. I believe we are simply not asking enough of the community.

A group of young people came in to the Street University a few years ago – around 30 different young people. They didn’t know each other and many of them had been kicked out of home. Many of them were gay and lesbian young people. They had been kicked out for being gay, they’d found themselves homeless and they started working together. They formed a dance group called The Pioneers. Again, I thought it was lovely. It’s not a focus of ours to create dance groups. One group went off to win X-Factor. And the other group went on to become one of Australia’s best dance groups. Then they raised $150,000 by themselves – we put just $5000 towards it – to take themselves to Las Vegas. They are now considered one of the top dance groups in the world.

Now why is that important from my perspective? There was no clinical aspect to it. These young people came in homeless, and now have a place to live. A lot of them are now dance teachers and gym instructors. A lot of them have jobs and their mental health has grown strong. They have done that, largely, not because of the counsellors that we have at our work, but because of the space that encouraged them to find themselves. That is where the community has a large role to play.

Communities and young people are diverse. My concern is that Australia at the moment is adopting a one size fits all, almost a corporate franchise model, to deal with young people’s mental health. This is no bad thing of itself, but we need more diversity in the field, and we need to be working together.

I see the future with governments stepping in to continue to fund Headspace. But an organisation like Headspace should reach out and work more with an organisation like the Ted Noffs Foundation so they can be the best at engaging, whether it’s forming a dance crew or running a hip hop workshop to bring it all together to work with the community. Working as an ecosystem is the only way we are going to reduce significant problems in young people’s lives and put Australia on the map when it comes to helping young people. It is the only way. We need an ecosystem, not a monopolisation. We also need clinical and broader community support to assist families with when we are intervening. Again, we need to be working with families, and governments need to acknowledge that too.

We need more cost/benefit analysis across the board – evidence is vital, and we also need to make sure that the distribution of funding reflects what is happening in communities. Local communities have answers and I think it’s important that we understand what the local needs are. If, for instance, at the three new services we are opening in Queensland, I cannot pretend to understand their issues. Without local knowledge, I’m going to get it wrong from the beginning and be defunded. It’s important for me, as a service provider, to understand what that community needs, and to talk to those people and bring them in. It’s not a difficult job and there are people out there who are very good at that. And it’s what we believe governments should be doing more of.

Australia is a country that values diversity. And our young people, particularly the most disadvantaged, warrant diversity in the services that can support and empower them to lead fulfilling, productive lives. Milton Luger, Ros’ husband, used to say – “There’s enough misery to go around.” And the sad thing that we’re facing now is that there’s not enough money for services like David’s, like Lane’s and like Headspace, as well as Noffs. We need to develop an ecosystem, we need equality, we need to work together and that is how we’re going to safe the future of Australia.