Closing the gap: Ganbina won’t wait for kids to hit rock bottom

The federal government spends more than $25 billion a year on Closing the Gap but advocates doubt it is working.

Ayla Van Aken jumped at the chance to take part in a training course last year.

The federal government spends more than $25 billion a year on Closing the Gap initiatives to improve the lives of indigenous people, but employment advocates say jobs are declining and targets will not be reached.

Adrian Appo founded the Aboriginal organisation Ganbina, which lifts youths from unemployment and encourages them through school to training or jobs to reach their potential.

Last month he told the CoAct employment conference in Canberra that there was a growing need to engage young people at an early age to prevent failure.

Appo says that unlike many employment programs, which wait for people to fail before they can get help, Ganbina’s program has had a decade of success in turning people around. It refuses to wait for youths to hit bottom.

“These organisations have been working from the deficit model, you’ve got to wait for the person to be unemployed to find them a position,” Appo says.

“What they’re saying is fail first … when you fail they turn up and there are other issues, substance abuse, family (problems), accommodation. You have to cover multiple issues as an employer.”

Ganbina and Appo’s Social Ventures Australia program have helped youths into work and training by targeting them.

“Early intervention works, the earlier you can intervene means you can build from success to succeeding — don’t wait for failure,” Appo says.

The key to engaging young people is to teach them the life skills they may be missing, and to focus on talents and strengths. That can mean encouraging an F-level high school student to work towards a C, or getting an A student to aim for an A-plus. It is their own idea of success rather than what they think the community expects. If that means working towards a job in a supermarket, they will own their journey.

With long-term support, Appo says, staff members work with young people to determine what they want to do in the future, then set out to help them attain those goals and go on to further education and a career, rather than finding a job as a stopgap measure.

“We go from school to work — we start working with kids from prep — and we go through until they’re 25,” he says. “We’re exposing them to a breadth of opportunities and access to career areas.”

He is concerned about reliance on government funding, whether it be unemployment benefits or grants to employment agencies to provide jobs, and says handouts are creating an inheritance of welfare and widening the gap, rather than improving the lot of indigenous youth.

Appo is also against lowering entry standards to allow people to start training or giving jobs to meet quotas.

“Don’t lower the benchmark, help your people to lift the benchmark,” he says. “The old adage used to be lower the standard but you only make it worse.”

National indigenous Culinary Institute program co-ordinator Cain Slater says engaging people to stay in training and progress to jobs involves trust.

“The ability to gain trust is crucial,” Slater says. “Involving family in the process is the most important part. Your family can give you a kick in the backside and provide extra guidance. Lecturing on indigenous employment has the opposite effect.”

Slater, who has helped train chefs to work in some of the nation’s top restaurants, including Rockpool, Aria and Catalina at Rose Bay in Sydney, says the best employers are not prepared to take people as a token gesture; they want genuine workers doing the hard yards.

“We want the employers to want to keep them because they’re the best workers,” Slater says.

He says companies should consider offering cultural training to staff before taking on indigenous employees, to ensure all workers understand each other.

Slater ensures any worker who goes to a remote community has to learn about the region, and that includes indigenous youths who may have grown up in western Sydney.

Brant hears call for training excellence

Australian Hearing recruitment services manager Paul Brant lives by the motto “aim for excellence”. In his 30 years in recruitment he has learned that if you do not aim for the stars, you are unlikely reach them.

Brant runs a training program for Aboriginal youths in conjunction with CoAct’s Hit the Ground Running program, offering real jobs at the end of their work experience and potentially long-term careers.

He says there is no exact science to recruitment, particularly with Aboriginal youths, but the more you consult with people on what they want to achieve, and the more successes are celebrated, the likelier a program will reach its goals.

Last year Brant ran his first training program with 12 young people. Six were later given administration jobs at national offices.

Ayla Van Aken, 25, jumped at the chance to take part in the training course when she realised last year that she had never had a full-time job.

“After school I was very interested in working in health and I had my heart set on nursing, but I did struggle with numeracy at school,” Van Aken says. “I ended up in hospitality for six years.”

Several of Van Aken’s friends had heard about the traineeships and she went along. After pushing from her partner she landed a five-month placement, leading to a full-time permanent position.

“I wanted to buy a property, I had savings, and I wanted to find something with a pathway to climb the ladder,” she says.

Van Aken has since begun training as a clinical assistant to practice audiologists, and feels the organisation has put its faith in her.