Cardboard and Cold Floors...

Tonight is the CEO Sleepout, and I've been asked a few times why I'm not taking part in it this year... 2 reasons; firstly, because part of the goal of the sleepeout is to raise awareness of the issue of homelessness, and as it's a passionate issue for me, I know my time and efforts can be put to other uses in this field.  Secondly, so many of my friends and acquaintances are involved that I find I'm encouraging donations to so many others who are doing it for the first time.

The CEO Sleepout is an incredibly fantastic way of both raising awareness and raising funds, and I can't praise the St Vincent De Paul Society enough for both this event and the tremendous work they do every night of the week.

For our part, the Big Bang Ballers will continue to run camps and day-sessions for at-risk and homeless kids in the region, in partnership with St Vinnie's, and we wish all the CEO's tonight a great experience and hopefully not too much freezing wind.

Personally, I'm tilting my hat at Philip Jones and Patrick Pentony, both first timers, who will be braving the weather tonight.

Over the last year of campaigning on the issue, I'm often faced with shock when I quote the figures of homelessness in Australia, as though people can't quite understand how homelessness exists in our Lucky Country... I share that shock, each and every day.  It's not good enough that this problem exists.  For the stats, click here.
A quarter of Australia’s homeless are children; that’s almost one in four homeless people under 18. Of every 42 Australian children under four, one has experienced homelessness.Every day, half the people who request immediate accommodation from the homeless service system are turned away, staggering when you consider 12,300 on an average day will be accommodated in services funded by the Government’s Supported Accommodation Assistance Program (SAAP). Two in every 3 children who need support are also turned away, as are almost 80% percent of families. The Indigenous population is facing even worse statistics. While Indigenous Australians comprise 2.4 percent of the population, they represent 10 percent of the homeless.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Speech to Campbell High Year 10 Graduation...

I've re-written this speech 100 times this week... I struggled with what to tell you, what to impart... let's start with what I won't tell you. I won’t tell you what to do with your life.   While the specifics are always interesting, there is never just one right path or option. I won’t tell you what your profession should be.   What you choose to do in life is never a matter for anyone else to judge or dictate. I won’t tell you what your opinions should be.   Where you end up philosophically is a matter for you and no one else.   I won’t tell you what you should do, what you should think, what you should feel, how you should speak. I won’t tell you to have the next few years of your life figured out.   I certainly didn’t at your age. I won’t tell you to go to university or not, to become a doctor or a mechanic, a teacher or a musician.   I won’t tell you to travel the world or never leave this town. I won’t talk to you about obstacles in life,
Read more

Ramblings in August...

Image
I’ve been sick for the last couple of days, to the point of being stuck in bed without being able to get up… that’s a lot of time to reflect… 11 months after arriving in Bangladesh, this paradoxical, improbably, impossibly beautiful mess of a country, I still hear the question: “why Bangladesh?”… Except now it always seems to be followed by “why for free?”… I find it to be the least comfortable of questions to answer; my experiences and reasons naturally differ greatly from those of others in my program. Our backgrounds and motivations are difficult to compare, so I often hesitate to respond, lest my answers be taken as a general rule… So why Bangladesh? Because that’s what I was offered. Had I been offered Somalia, Colombia, the Philippines, Laos or Samoa, I would have accepted any of them… someone once told me that if I was serious about working in development and aid, my primary purpose should always be to work myself out of a job… unfortunately, as it stands, the need for help is s
Read more

Seeing it for the first time...

It's frustrating. It's frustrating to have to face the same challenges for every project, every decision, every idea. The first few times it was amusing; perhaps that's not quite the right way to describe it, but nevertheless it didn't inspire the same sense of frustration it does now. I wish I could go into detail, however corporate privacy and all... not that it seems to matter much in Bangladesh, in the words of my Supervisor there is no such thing as "copyright" or "security" here... My mother tells me to stop being a wuss and get more creative.  Infuriatingly, she's right. When your game plan stops working, you have to change it. So here I am drawing up a new game plan.  Again. I just have to concentrate on seeing the situation again for the first time, so as not to let the frustrations overwhelm my concentration. I met up with quite a few locals last night for a couple games of ball.  Add that to the list of surreal experiences in Banglades
Read more