The Waiben Youth Empowerment Club is bringing people of all ages together to shape the community’s future. Photo: Supplied.
A new youth empowerment group on Waiben is giving young people the guidance and voice they need to shape their community’s future.
Open to Year 7 and 8 students, the Waiben Youth Empowerment Club held its inaugural meeting on 6 January at Tagai State College, bringing together community leaders and youth to carve a strong future together.
As a local father and volunteer with the Junior Youth Spiritual Empowerment Program, organiser Josh Toloui-Wallace said he had a deep passion for helping young people find their way.
“It came from this desire to help young people, because we can see the world around us — the opportunities available to them, especially up here on Thursday Island, are quite limited,” he said.
“Oftentimes, youth are treated like children, but expected to behave like adults.
“I think something that I’ve learned is that they’re unique, and they actually need to be treated in a unique way as youth, which is something I really wanted to explore with other people in the community.”
Through months of community meetings, Mr Toloui-Wallace said they formed a solid group of facilitators to lead the new Youth Empowerment Club.
The main takeaway, he said, was the need for community ownership alongside strong institutions.
“The rhetoric is, when there’s youth crime, people go to the police and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to fix this’, or they go to the council or the government and say, ‘What are you doing about this,'” he said.
“We actually have to come together as a community, and not only rely on our institutions to just sort it out.
“We explored how we can build the youths’ capacity, give them skills and knowledge step by step, and accompany them along the way to the kind of adults that we hope for in a community.”
Over the school term, he said facilitators would help participants “observe their social reality and identify things that could be improved”.
“We’ve made a program that’s loosely based on the Junior Youth Spiritual Empowerment Program, but more targeted at building the capacity for social action,” he said.
“The goal this term is to have one project that we can actually deliver with them before the end of the term.”
Mr Toloui-Wallace said the ultimate goal was to have youth grow up in the program, and eventually become the facilitators when they became senior students.
“If we can be consistent with this effort, then it becomes self-perpetuating, because those youth that have gone through it, they’re the best role models for the next generation,” he said.
“They’re so impressionable at that young age that whoever they look up to, that’s what they follow.
“We’re really trying to make sure that they have good role models, and not just role models like sport stars, but people like their cousins, their family, their friends — people in the community that they see doing good things.”
