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Jess G, Roving reporter

The Southern Metropolitan Regional Forum Youth Workshop

On Wednesday 4 June 2008, a youth workshop was held at the St Kilda Town Hall in Melbourne. The workshop was hosted by the Southern Metropolitan Regional Management Forum, which was set up to help smooth the implementation of State Government policies in the southern parts of Melbourne. The youth workshop was a chance to look at how the Government works with young people, and to allow young people to have a say about the issues that affect them.

At the beginning of the workshop, guest speaker James Montgomery, from the Office for Youth, explained the importance of prioritising young people. He furthered this by saying, "If we have people who have the capacity to seek help for themselves then this will be a big step."

A big step indeed, considering the wide area of issues faced by "young people". The following hours saw four major areas of youth-related issues being workshopped by some of the biggest names in the southern metropolitan area.

Mental health and wellbeing

After an individual visioning exercise, each group was asked to share their ideas with their table as means of opening the discussion. I was seated on the Mental Health and Wellbeing table. Our table spent the first hour simply sifting through everyone's ideas and opinions. It seemed everyone had strong thoughts on what should be available in terms of mental health services for young people.

Many ideas were thrown into the mix, but there was one major point of agreement: that the philosophical outlook should be that mental health care for young people is a family problem, not just a problem for the child. As David Spokes, CEO of Port Phillip Council puts it, "families need to be seen as a solution and not as part of the problem."

The second half of the workshop asked each table to bring together their main ideas, and to look at them in more detail. For the Mental Health and Wellbeing group, the main ideas were:

• A single, readily identifiable portal for mental health care for young people in the southern metropolitan region - something well-known, "like [young people] know McDonald's" according to Carolyn McClean from Bayside City Council
• Increased health standards for youth in terms of wellbeing treatment, physiological treatment, service delivery and improvements in health and quality
• Addressing the stigma among young people of obtaining mental health care through marketing campaigns (use of the media), talking to young people, and having greater contact with schools
• Partnerships between private and public entities - organisations such as Kids Helpline, Headspace and youthcentral have fantastic resources that could be utilised to create a more effective service for young people
• Ensuring that young people are never more than 3 clicks/hits away from the help they need by combining online, in-person and telephone resources

Family relationships

While we were eagerly designing our mental health and wellbeing strategies, the table next to us was looking in depth at Strengthening Family Relationships. Their main ideas were:

• Programs should have a greater focus on youth- and family-based approaches
• Teachers need to participate with young people in a more holistic way, and should be given more time and space in the school day to go to meetings with Government departments
• Research needs to be conducted regarding relationships between children and their parents during family breakdowns
• Continual improvement by learning from evaluation and feedback is essential
• Partnerships between local government and all contributors to the Southern Metropolitan Regional Management Forum need to be established
• Effective evaluation is needed to ensure that increasing prevention and early intervention decreases the need for tertiary services
• Qualitative and quantitative longitudinal study on young people and families needs to be conducted in order to produce effective strategies in the future
• At the end of the workshop each table reported back to the rest of the group. The forum is designed to created action, thus it is possible that we will be seeing the outcomes of this workshop in the community very soon.

What did I think?

As a young person living in the Southern Metropolitan region, it was nice to see that there was interest being taken into our needs as a demographic.

As Sheila Ross from the Department of Human Services put it, "We're not here to dwell on our own thoughts on what there should be; but more about what [youth] want and need."

For more about the Southern Metropolitan Regional Forum Youth Workshop, check out roving reporter Stef's report on the proceedings.

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