A note from our Data and Youth Insights Director
For young people in their first years of secondary school in Australia, 2021 presented some familiar challenges as well as some brand new ones.
We know that two years of the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted teenagers’ social activities, their schooling and their wellbeing. We also know that for teens living in families and/or households with vulnerabilities - whether they be financial stress, insecure housing or violence - the added disruption of remote learning and uncertainty has created additional issues. The full impact of the disruption of COVID-19 and associated lockdowns may take many years to fully evidence, particularly for today’s children and young people. At Raise we saw the disruption and challenge firsthand, supporting over 2,120 young people across Australia and providing connection and consistency amidst change and upheaval. We know for some young people in locked down areas, mentoring was one of the few, and sometimes only, school periods they consistently attended. We also know that the volunteer mentors who signed up for mentoring expecting to build an individual connection with a teenager also experienced additional benefits to the ones we see year in and year out at Raise. Mentors told us about looking forward to mentoring each week to connect with their mentee as well as other mentors in their group and their Raise Program Counsellor - in a period where lockdowns limited social interaction. As the majority of Raise programs moved from face-to-face to being delivered online, technology became our source of connection and enabled us to continue the majority of mentoring relationships. However, it also threw into stark relief the compounding impact of disadvantage on reliable and secure access to technology. In some families that did not have suitable devices or not enough devices to go around, young people were unable to participate in mentoring and in some cases also in learning. We also saw that access to consistent data plans and internet connection was a substantial barrier.
Raise delivers early intervention programs in schools in order to support wellbeing teams, build and strengthen school relationships and engagement, and form part of a wider referral system. We know the pandemic has put further pressure on already stretched health systems, particularly in areas outside cities and major regional centres. Early intervention programs are more important than ever to ease this pressure and build help-seeking and social and emotional wellbeing skills in young people at risk of disengagement and crisis. For this reason we are particularly excited by the early findings of our pilot of online only mentoring, which in 2021 included Temora High School in the central west of New South Wales. We can see the power and potential of online mentoring to reach and provide an essential service, a mentor, to young people, who do not have the same access to support as their peers in the cities. In 2022 we will expand into other regional and rural schools and reach more young people in difficult to service areas. From the early days of Raise through to today, evaluation has been integral to designing what we do and improving how we do it, year on year. We have strong internal evaluation and quality assurance processes. In 2022, we will build on these by commissioning a two-year external, independent evaluation of the impact of the Raise program on the young people who participate. The evaluation will be an opportunity to gain independent quality assurance over our evaluation practices and measurement, as well as gain expert insight into the effectiveness of our program. We are excited about the opportunity to build on the learnings and the innovation, borne from the challenges 2021 presented, to ensure our program makes even more of an impact in 2022, working with the young people who need us most. Lucy Snowball
The power of showing up | raise.org.au
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