Couch Surfing races at Civic Park coincides with Youth Homelessness Matters Day 2024
It was a day of fun and frivolity, featuring couches glammed up like Hollywood starlets and wheeled divans shooting across the bitumen, but no-one can forget the core message. See the pictures.
It was a day of fun and frivolity, featuring couches glammed up like Hollywood starlets and wheeled divans shooting across the bitumen, but no-one can forget the core message: that on any given night in the Territory, there are 3000 children aged 12–15 who are homeless.
Anglicare NT and the City of Darwin hosted the 12th annual Couch Surfing races at Civic Park on Wednesday, coinciding with Youth Homelessness Matters Day 2024.
More than 20 teams of young people competed in the fast-paced race heats, with several teams travelling from Katherine and Nhulunbuy to take part.
The NT News caught up with the mighty ‘Palmy Army’, from the Palmerston Youth Drop In Centre, just prior to their heat one race, which they blitzed after the other team came unstuck on a sweeping bend of the course.
Lorenzo Retchford was bullish about his team’s chances.
“We know we can win, we believe we can win,” he said.
Lorenzo said the crew had spent the past five or six weeks decorating their couch, which was designed to “represent Torres Strait and Indigenous culture”.
Prior to the races, Territory Families, Housing and Communities’ new chief executive, Emma White told the audience combating youth homelessness involved more than just “providing a safe and secure housing option”.
“Prevention is equally, if not the most, crucial thing of all,” she said.
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“Focusing on jobs, education, matching young people to their interests, whether that be art and culture, or construction, has to be central to our support system.”
According to census data, the Territory has almost twelve times the national average rate of homelessness in Australia, and nearly half of all Territorians experiencing homelessness are under the age of 25.
Each day in the Territory, about 26 requests for specialist homelessness assistance go unmet.
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