Youth homlessness matters
The Oasis homeless short film competition (OHSFC) and The Oasis school curriculum resource were launched on April 6 by Cate Blanchett and Peter Garrett at the Oasis Youth Support Network in Surry Hills.
The short film competition is part of an outreach program central to tackling the growing incidence of youth homelessness.
The OHSFC is a national competition open to secondary school students worth $25,000 in prize money. The competition closes on September 16 with winners announced in November, 15 finalists will be screened by the Sydney Theatre Company to coincide with the announcement.
At the launch the audience was treated to a three minute excerpt from chairman of the Caledonia foundation and producer and co-director Ian Darling’s film The Oasis. The film is set in the Oasis Youth Support Network and deals with issues of youth homelessness.
“Since The Oasis initiative was launched the Caledonia foundation has been focussed on continuing to raise awareness of homelessness through school curriculum programs to support teachers and involve young people in preventing and solving youth homelessness,” Mr Darling said.
Ms Blanchett said that a week before Mr Darling launched his documentary film The Oasis in 2008, she was giving birth to her third child Ignatius. Ms Blanchett said that the film served as a “powerful reminder” that not every child born in Australia is born into a home which is safe and stable.
“Watching the film I was shocked by the extent of the problem of youth homelessness,” she said. “But I was also inspired by the stories of the street kids themselves, stories of survival that quite frankly beggar belief.”
Ms Blanchett is patron of the OHSFC and co-director of the Sydney Theatre Company.
“The arts, including film and theatre have an exceptional and unique capacity to tell stories that raise awareness about important social issues and create change in our community,” she said. “The OHSFC is a really powerful and important initiative because it actively engages school students in understanding and highlighting the issues of youth homelessness, encouraging them to focus on young people less fortunate than themselves.
“In my role as patron I’d like to encourage school students, primary and secondary, to not only pick up a camera and participate in the competition, but to… delve into the issues and make outstanding films, films that raise awareness tell really inspiring stories and provide solutions that not only touch our hearts but provoke us into making real action and change.”
Minister for School education, early childhood and youth, Peter Garrett launched the The Oasis school curriculum resource before a crowd which included Minister for Human Services and Minister for Social Inclusion Tanya Plibersek.
The resource included a document entitled “Youth Homelessness Matters” and came with a copy of The Oasis documentary.
“I am very, very pleased that we now have a curriculum which fits into the national curriculum,” he said. “There are about 1 in 100 kids who are homeless in our country… it is a real, present and urgent issue for us to address.
“We do know that the issue of youth homelessness matters and we’re going to get on with the job of fixing that.”
Mr Garrett talked about what the federal government was doing to address this “really difficult” issue for young Australians.
“We want to halve homelessness by 2020,” he said. “That may seem a long way away but it is a really ambitious target to aim for.”
Mr Garrett said that the federal government had an agreement with other states and territories to fund initiatives to reach the target by 2020.
April 6 was Youth Homelessness Matters Day, an initiative of youth workers from Youth Accommodation Interagency Nepean, which began in 2005 to help raise awareness about young people at risk or experiencing homelessness.
According to ABS statistics the incidence of youth homelessness has doubled in Australia in the last 20 years with 32,000 people under 25 defined as homeless.
