Masonicare supports Rough Edges youth initiative

Masonicare has donated a $10,000 cheque to the Rough Edges café to support initiatives taken with youth.

The cheque is the third of five cheques to be presented through the Minchin bequest and is to focus on conflict resolution programs in the East Sydney area.

Geoff Miles of St John’s Darlinghurst, the initiators of Rough Edges, said “the money will be used to employ an education officer.”

“An identified area of need is to communicate the principles of conflict resolution to youth and to educate them with an appreciation of the dynamics that lead to homelessness,” he said.

Gemma Hayes is the new education officer and is developing street walks with high school students and youth groups.

“The walks are about breaking down fear … it’s about challenging these perceptions that the homeless are mentally unwell and that they make our neighbourhoods unsafe,” she said.

“They’re [the homeless] victims of violence not perpetrators of violence.”

She wants to tie the walks in with the council’s vision for vibrant local communities by 2030, but said, “my fear is who’s not going to be included in these communities.”

“Kings Cross is a unique area where you have this middle class/wealthy meets the homeless … and one of the problems is that the middle class think that the homeless can’t be trusted,” she said.

Part of the Sustainable Sydney 2030 vision is for 45 percent of people to believe that others can be trusted.

What Hayes is trying to do is create interactions and links between people that break down these perceptions.

The walks will engage with public spaces in Kings Cross to explore alternatives to violence.

She said that public spaces have often become “middle class spaces” where homeless people no longer feel comfortable.

“They’re already homeless and then we make them placeless as well,” she said.

One stop on the walk will be a Holocaust memorial, because the memorial has become a safe space for the homeless, she said.

“Often people don’t see prejudice against homeless people as discrimination.”

But at the memorial people can see the link much more clearly, she said.

The street walks program will eventually do three walks a week.

Hayes also hopes to train up homeless people to be able to tell their stories well.

St John’s also offers legal and counselling services as well as a drop in coffee shop for the marginalised.

By Jemma Castle