Ryan Dingle, aka Twitch streamer PandaTV, offers care backpacks to Melbourne’s homeless population
Ryan Dingle challenged all expectations when he rose from a homeless teen to become a famous Australian gamer. Now his focus is back on the streets.
Several bystanders scurry away and avert their gazes as an irate homeless man, screaming obscenities, makes a scene in a CBD mall.
Ryan Dingle, burly and heavily tattooed, approaches with little hesitation.
“Hey matey – how are ya bud?” he asks gently as he introduces himself.
Dingle, better known as Twitch streamer PandaTV, quickly offers the man a backpack filled with simple necessities like underwear, socks and toiletries.
The man sits, seemingly awe-struck.
“That’s for me?” he asks, puzzled.
His irate behaviour completely settles and before too long the two men are even having a laugh.
Dingle, 38, shouts the man a McDonald’s feed and they sit cordially on a park bench in conversation.
It’s just one of many interactions Dingle, a famous personality in the Australian gaming community, has had with Melbourne’s homeless population recently.
Having achieved success through gaming and Twitch streaming, Dingle recently launched Project Panda, which, among other support, offers care backpacks to Melbourne’s homeless.
During that time, Dingle also helped the city’s homeless with food and crisis accommodation, searched for employment on their behalf and offered them advice on connecting with other support networks.
While not everyone enjoys the approach, Dingle has started sharing his candid interactions with Melbourne’s homeless on his social media channels.
To him, it’s a way to give a voice to the otherwise unheard.
“You meet people from all different walks of life, and people are suffering from hardships – there are loads of different reasons why someone might be freaking out in the street,” he told news.com.au.
“People give them money and stuff. But no one stops and takes the time to ask if they’re or if there is anything else we can do?”
Drugs and documents
By asking those questions, Dingle says he is beginning to form a snapshot of what is driving homelessness in Melbourne, which has been significantly increasing in recent years.
It’s a life Dingle is personally familiar with, having grown up around homelessness, crime and family drug use, with his earliest memories involving drug raids and being stripsearched by police.
Later in life, Dingle worked as a bouncer in grimy bars and hospitals in Australia and Canada before turning gaming into a full-time job.
Among the catalysts for homelessness he has observed on Melbourne’s streets, drug dependency, a lack of personal documentation, and rising costs of living stick out.
“A lot of people say the same thing over and over again about (crisis accommodation) – you can go there, but if you’re an addict and you’re trying to stay away from drugs, there’s so much drug use in those places,” he explained.
He said another big issue is the lack of ID, which is often essential to accessing certain support services.
“A lot of the time, they’ll say I can’t access anything because I don’t have ID... and people are robbing each other for IDs,” Dingle explained.
The emergence of meth in Australia in recent decades has also changed the the coal face of homelessness problem, according to Dingle who remembers all too well what it was like before the drug hit our shores.
“Ten years ago, if there was another homeless person, you sort of looked out for each other,” he explained.
“These days, they say, ‘there’s a lot of violence between homeless people and there’s no sort of camaraderie anymore’.”
“A lot of that, from what I’m told, is stemming from ice and all these very intense drugs that have people are on now.
“When we were homeless, mum was on heroin, so she would take it and then just smack out,” he said.
“She’d just be asleep – people are taking drugs now that are making them incredibly violent and in a state that can be so up and down.”
Some homeless people have told Dingle more drug support is needed, including more contentious injection clinics, as was mentioned by the gentleman approached at the beginning of the story.
It was front of mind for the man when Dingle asked what more could be done.
“There needs to be another injection room,” he said.
New faces of destitution
Dingle pointed out one recent man he was able to help on the city streets, who he suspected was a victim of the current cost-of-living crisis.
He described the young man, whom he guessed was no older than 21, as “pretty switched on”, in good health and seemingly clean of drugs.
Footage of the pair sitting and talking revealed that the man was eager to work to look after himself and, sadly, was struggling to find youth-appropriate homeless support services.
“I just came up here from Tassie, came up with a mate and didn’t really have anything in Tassie and didn’t really have anything here either,” the young man said when asked how he ended up where he is.
Expanding on this interaction, Dingle told news.com.au he was fearful of a new wave of homelessness driven by rising cost of living pressure.
“We’re so lucky to live in this country in terms of safety and stuff like that, but I will say it is one of the most unfair countries I’ve ever lived in anywhere in the world in terms of the cost of living,” he told news.com.au.
“Yes, our minimum wage is higher, but it’s also $5 for a bottle of Coke.”
In late March, it was reported that 45 per cent of Australians have less than $1000 in their bank accounts, which is approximately 9.4 million individuals.
Additionally, a staggering 20 per cent of Aussies admit to having no savings whatsoever.
According to the study, the average bank balance for the 9.4 million with meagre savings is $210.
Dingle agreed there would be a large portion of the Australian population teetering on the edge of homelessness.
“One bad month, and they’re stuffed,” he said.
“There’s so many harsh things out there in this world at the moment and cost of living on top of that. It’s an extremely hard situation for young Australians to be in.”
When he’s not on the streets helping out or Twitch streaming, Dingle and the Panda Project work with schools and foster children, among other focus areas, on ways to emerge from poverty.
He hopes one day to be able to share personal insights and those gathered in his videos, with larger support organisations, or even governments.
According to the 2021 ABS Census – the latest figures available – 122,494 individuals in Australia are experiencing homelessness.
One in seven of these people are children under the age of 12, while almost one in four of those experiencing homelessness are children and young people aged between 12 and 24.
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