Cities for young people: a conversation with Yarra Youth Ambassadors

One of the key aims of Cities People Love is to work towards a more equitable city where the public is involved in debates and decisions around the future of urban spaces. This includes providing a platform and advocating for diverse voices that sit outside of the mainstream.

With this in mind, as part of our research release on the theme of ‘Home’, Cities People Love met online with representatives of the Yarra Youth Ambassadors - Monica, Wilson, Cynthia and Toyin - to talk about their experiences of home during Covid and their aspirations for the future of their community.

About the Yarra Youth Ambassadors

Yarra Youth Ambassadors are a group of motivated young leaders aged between 12 and 25 years of age who work collectively on activities and programs that address issues important to the community in the City of Yarra municipality.

The Program was developed to create a supportive space in which young people could mobilise around issues they are passionate about and work together to shape their communities.

The Program is youth led and everything that happens in the program is initiated by the young people who are engaged in it.

With the support of Yarra City Council's Yarra Youth Services, young people design, develop and deliver different advocacy projects and collaborate with Council to inform the development of a range of youth-based plans and programs.

According to the Yarra Family, Youth and Children’s Services (Acting) Team Leader, the model works because the young people who attend the program decide on its direction and are often the ones who are the most passionate about the topics that are explored.

Our conversation with the Yarra Youth Ambassadors

We asked the Youth Ambassadors if their feelings towards their homes or the way they use their homes had changed during Covid. For these young people, being stuck indoors in small apartments with no backyards, often sharing the spaces with large families, was hard.

The density of the public housing environment and seeing the experiences of public housing residents in Flemington and North Melbourne, who were subject to a government mandated 'hard lockdown' earlier this year, impacted how they felt and acted:

“The kids want to be outside playing but the parents don’t want them to go outside as much. The parents are scared of all this [Covid-19] happening in Fitzroy. If it happens here it’s going to be a big lockdown because everyone’s close - because there’s a lot of flats. As soon as one person catches the virus, the whole flats are going to be shut down. The same thing that happened to Flemington and North Melbourne is going to happen to Fitzroy.”

The Youth Ambassadors also described how their relationships with friends had suffered over this period:

“It’s been challenging as a high-school student learning from home. Socially it’s been quite hard not seeing my friends for extended periods of time but we’re lucky to be living in the 21st century and have technology to support social interaction.”

“It’s been difficult not being able to see your friends and do the things you love – before Covid we were playing indoor football every Sunday. We’d have a laugh and after the game hang out and eat together and spend the day together. I’ve missed that - not being able to have that experience for months changes you. Not being able to have these experiences with my mates and do the things we love – football, have a laugh, a bit of banter”

However, despite these hardships, there were also experiences of increased connection with family through spending more time together and finding new ways to bond such as movie nights, family walks and board games.

The group talked about how the public housing community came together during Covid to support each other, with residents talking to each other more and checking in with other individuals and families on the estate:

“It [Covid] is something we’ve all had to go through, and we really connect and share our experiences. It has impacted everyone so it’s something we can have in common with people who we might not have necessarily spoken to in the past."

And, for this group, the experience was also something that had the potential to unite people of different backgrounds and provide a starting point for further connection:

“I believe that Covid has bought us all together, bought a lot of communities together – we’re all dealing with this one same crisis at the same time, it’s an enemy we’ve all been dealing with. We can all agree on the fact that Covid has been tough for everyone and nobody can disagree with that. It’s bought people together because as long as we can agree on one thing there’s always room to talk things out and evolve from that.”

When asked about the work that they do and their hopes for the future, the Youth Ambassador representatives shared their aspirations for a more sustainable and equitable society.

These young people spoke passionately about the need for a more eco-friendly and sustainable society:

“We need to help the environment, protect our trees, address the impacts of global warming and realise our actions have consequences for the future of our planet. We need to change our behaviours”.

They are currently working on programs to educate the community about recycling and re-usable equipment.

The group also spoke about the challenges that young people on the estate face, and the stigma they face related to their housing circumstances and ethnicity.

“I want racism to end. I know this is a little bit unrealistic as people will always be judgmental, people will always have their own opinions and their own prejudice and judgment about other people. Humanity refuses to see each other as human beings and most people are treated as less than they are because of their religion or the colour of their skin. I wish we could all get over that realise we’re all human at the end of the day.”

"I want people to be more accepting. It doesn’t matter what belief, what culture, we’re all the same at the end of the day. To treat someone else differently because of their colour, their gender or even their religion has always happened, and we’ve been through this process over and over again – to see that change would be the best thing.”

The Youth Ambassador group is seen as an essential service to address this stigma through offering opportunities to identify and address issues important to their community:

"It’s a very difficult time to be of African descent. It was important for me to have a service there that could help me. It's so important to help young people mentally and emotionally so they can have a better outlook at life."

"Youth Ambassadors is able to voice the community's opinions and the community's problems. We want to show the community that there are young people able to lead and be role models to other children."

To support their community, the group has recently advocated for improved mental health services for young people during the Covid-19 pandemic by organising and facilitating a forum on the public-housing estate to address the barriers that young people, and particularly young men from African backgrounds, face in seeking mental health support.

This forum enabled these young men to share their stories, connect with others facing similar challenges, and learn about mental-health organisations offering support.

Start your own conversation

The voices of marginalised young people are often not heard by the general community and are often excluded from public debates by professionals and policy makers due to unequal power relations [1].

Young people with disabilities, those from ethnic minorities or refugee families, or from the LGBTIQ community do not often get a chance to view their opinions or share their experiences. As a result, their perspectives are often excluded from policies that affect them directly, such as education policy, housing and urban policy, or welfare policy.

When these voices are not heard, the public debate misses out on unique viewpoints that can challenge mainstream perspectives. This contributes to the assumption that mainstream experiences are shared by all, when this is far from reality.

Young people living in public housing high-rise towers in inner-city Melbourne experience in their everyday lives intersecting and multiple oppression: they are young, they live in a highly stigmatised living environment, many are visibly different from the Anglo-Australian majority, and most come from low-income backgrounds.

However, within such communities there are champions who are vocal and engaged in what those communities need and want, and actively seek spaces and platform to share their ideas and advocacy efforts. By reaching out to these groups and speaking with them, we can learn so much about their unique viewpoints and perspectives to inform our policy and practice.

It is critical that policy makers, and urban and design professionals, listen to the lived experiences of marginalised young people and involve them in decision making processes – in planning their living environments and imagining better futures for their communities.

We thank the members of the Yarra Youth Ambassadors for sharing their insights into the experiences of young people with us.

To learn more about the Yarra Youth Ambassadors and how you can do something similar in your community see: Yarra Youth Ambassadors