By Mikayla van Loon
Meg Yates has been helping vulnerable young people for over 15 years in the counselling and youth work space, making a difference in their current lives and their future lives.
She was recently nominated for a Westfield Local Hero award for her not-for-profit Trek Learning Centre in Olinda, a safe place for young people who have had a traumatic upbringing to re-engage with learning and with themselves.
Although very humbled by the nomination, Ms Yates said she feels quite uncomfortable about it because it has been a team effort.
“So it’s lovely for us organisationally and I think as a team and what we bring. I feel very privileged to work with the team that I’ve got, I’m really lucky.”
Many of the young people Ms Yates meets have come through youth justice, social services, child protection or another support service, as well as those with disability.
Ms Yates said most have had some sort of traumatic experience in their young life, which has perhaps prevented them from attending school at the ages of 10 through to 14.
“Trauma impacts the brain enormously and impacts the way the brain develops and impacts the way the brain functions,” she said.
“How the brain prioritises certain elements for survival in memory and regulation and things like that aren’t great for children and young people who’ve experienced trauma.”
Trauma also brings a number of barriers, preventing them from having success in learning and often, without a program like Trek, TAFE is where these young people end up.
“Quite often young people who maybe haven’t participated well in school or have been disengaged for long periods, or had lots of barriers, quite often get funnelled into the TAFE system,” Ms Yates said.
“Only about 2 per cent of vulnerable learners actually complete a course and so it’s this really negative experience.”
Trek Learning Centre is about thinking outside the box to allow young people to regain their confidence and to feel any emotions they might be feeling without judgement.
“It’s the shame of, often, the lives they were born into and there’s no fault that lies with them but they carry a lot of that.
“A lot of the work we do is really around rebuilding them to have a sense of pride, to reignite curiosity, to calm the nervous system, to fill in some of those really functional gaps that allow them to be able to go forward with the basic foundational knowledge that they need to be successful.”
Having 10 acres of farmland to grow vegie gardens, to do pottery and blacksmithing and to look after animals, gives these young people the space to learn that not everything has to be right or perfect.
“We do lots of things here on purpose that can’t be right to really try to reduce this attachment that ‘if you can’t do it right, then I won’t do it’ and that’s how a lot of school refusal happens.”
Covid-19 has had a really large impact on these young people, many of whom couldn’t complete home learning because they didn’t have access to computers or internet.
For others, it has been even more serious.
“This year has been quite dire. So it always makes me feel very emotional. We’ve very, very nearly lost a couple of young people to quite serious suicide attempts this year,” Ms Yates said.
But yet attendance throughout has remained at nearly 100 per cent, with some only missing days if they have been hospitalised or are sick.
“I think that speaks volumes that they come and for whatever reason we do see the results.
“We do see young people that we’ve had great fear for, go on and live really ‘normal’ lives where they’re having part time jobs, and re-engaging in school and have friendships.
“That is really beautiful to witness that shift. That’s the right, you would think, of all our young people here in Australia, to have health and wellbeing and to be able to have friendships and be in the world.”
Ms Yates said the intangible conversations that say ‘you will be alright’ and ‘Covid-19 will be over soon’ don’t help to release the fear these young people have around the current situation.
That’s why through the Trek Program Ms Yates and her team are always looking for small ways they can move forward into the future, even if it is as simple as planting the next lot of vegetables.
