Youth Opportunities’ vision is a world where all young people have opportunities to be their best.
During 2020, this vision has been tested like never before as Australia’s youth have been challenged by the devastating bushfires, and then faced the sustained impact of COVID-19. This caused considerable disruption to schooling, increased mental health concerns, and widespread unemployment.
Our organisation was also challenged, as we too had to quickly adapt the delivery of our face to face Personal Leadership Program to support young people who were now learning from home. And the results were astounding.
Through the use of our interactive and online personal leadership program, Thrive Online, and supported by coaching and peer mentoring over Zoom, in spite of the significant and complex challenges these young people were facing, they thrived.
Throughout this report you can read testimonials from participants, watch a highlight reel of our virtual graduation ceremony and, most importantly, see the profound impact through our robust outcome measurements.
While none of us anticipated how COVID-19 would change our organisation, I am proud to say it has given us an opportunity to innovate and create a new service model which has proven successful, is not limited by geographical boundaries, and now allows us to deliver our programs at scale.
We look forward to the chance to partner with more schools, communities and the government in the future to ensure together we can reach more young people who, in the coming years, will need our support more than ever before.
Erin Faehrmann
Chief Executive