Coffee with a conscience: Salvos raising awareness of a ‘solvable’ issue
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
BY KIRRALEE NICOLLE
This Youth Homelessness Matters Day on 15 April, The Salvation Army in South Australia partnered with cafes and other service providers across Adelaide to raise awareness of the issue of housing instability for youth and young adults.
Alongside the Toward Home Alliance and its partners, and the service providers from the Adelaide North West Homelessness Alliance (ANWHA), The Salvation Army has led a push to get information about youth homelessness into the hands of those who can make a difference.
When Megan Elms (Program Manager - Youth Homelessness SA) and her team first had an idea to print informative sleeves for coffee cups, they imagined they would partner with just one cafe.
“We’ve printed and distributed 2500 coffee sleeves,” she said. “And this was meant to be our little year!”
The team designed and delivered thousands of sleeves to more than 10 cafes across Adelaide in time for Youth Homelessness Matters Day. Each sleeve featured a QR code that directed to the Home Time campaign, a drive to unlock housing for the 40,000 children and young people in Australia with no fixed address.
With the coffee sleeves, the team hopes to reduce stigma around what homelessness looks like in young people, and why it happens. They also specifically chose cafes near to council buildings, to ensure the cups reached the right hands.
Several of the cafes who stocked the sleeves. Images: Supplied
“We’re trying to say [that] kids leave home not because they’re rebels who don’t want to follow rules, [but] because it’s honestly unsafe for them to be at home, and they would rather sleep in a cemetery than be at home because it’s so unsafe,” Megan said.
“That’s what we’re looking at. We’re not looking at kids just deciding that they don’t want to obey rules. That’s not it.”
She said during this past financial year, The Salvation Army alone had assisted 352 young people in the North East of Adelaide. In the North West, the ANWHA had seen 987 young people so far in the financial year.
Megan said another aspect of youth homelessness that led to a lack of understanding was that much of it involved couch surfing rather than sleeping rough.
“That’s not what it looks like in the youth space,” she said. “Yet, it’s one of the fastest growing forms of homelessness. I believe it can be solved if we get the right funding and the right models.”
Rosealeigh’s story At the launch event held at Ingle Farm Corps on 15 April, lived experience advocate Rosealeigh shared from her story of experiencing homelessness prior to finding housing and support through The Salvation Army.
Rosealeigh was 14 when she first experienced homelessness, an age she said was one at which a young person should be worrying about school, friends, hobbies and growing up, not where they were going to sleep, whether they were safe or how they were going to eat.
“But that was my reality,” she said. “People in [the Department for Child Protection] knew what was happening for me, but I was told ‘you’re not young enough, you’re too independent’.
“I want you to imagine how that feels: being a child and being told you’re on your own.”
With the help of The Salvation Army, Rosealeigh said she was now in stable housing, and had re-enrolled in school. But she said the fear persisted that things could be taken away again.
“If you work in services, please take the time to get to know young people,” she urged. “Be flexible [and] understand that stability must come first. And if you’ve experienced homelessness yourself, please know this: you are not alone, and your story matters.”
If you or someone you know in Adelaide needs help, you can find it at the below:
- Homelessness Connect - Ph 1800 003 308
- Adelaide North West Homelessness Alliance - Ph 1800 569 086 (https://anwhahome.org.au/)
- Lifeline - Ph 131 114
- Kids Helpline - Ph 1800 551 800
Of the 40,000 young people in Australia who have nowhere to live, about 9500 are between the ages of 15 to 17, while thousands more are even younger. This information and more can be found at the Home Time website.
Oasis Youth Services in Surry Hills, Sydney, also hosted events on Wednesday 15 April to mark Youth Homelessness Matters Day. Salvos Online will bring you a report on this next week.
