Kids in need given a sporting chance at life

If the federal budget delivers a pot of new money to outlier mental health services, Indigenous educator Cheryl Kickett-Tucker says it will save lives.

Talyiah McGowan, 15, and Caris Tucker, 11, with Cheryl Kickett-Tucker as Heath Reynolds, 16, practises his shooting.

If the federal budget delivers a pot of new money to outlier mental health services, as well as mainstream ones, Cheryl Kickett-Tucker says she will believe the Morrison government has grasped the value of both streams in saving young lives.

The award-winning Indigenous educator and sports coach has worked extensively with Perth’s troubled teenagers, using after-school sports and group activities to attract them into a holistic wellbeing program called Kaat Koort n  Horizons.

“We’ve usually got 300 kids on our books, from 18 different ­nationalities,” said Professor Kickett-Tucker, a Curtin University ­research fellow who also sits on ­Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt’s National Co-Design Group for an Indigenous voice.

“These are kids who won’t walk into mainstream services but they’ll sign up for one of our 12 basketball teams, or 10 ­netball teams or soccer or swimming. And then we teach them peer support and strong family kinship.

“We also have 450 participants in girls academies in high schools, a peer ambassador program and a youth summit.”

The wellbeing programs cost about $1.5m a year and are largely funded from the National Indigenous Australians Agency.

“I would like more budget funding to go into early intervention and prevention, because we can stop kids from suiciding and ending up in detention,” professor Kickett-Tucker said.

“Everywhere I go people say ‘please set up something like that for us’. One lady told me ‘we’ve had 20 suicides among our young people, please come’.

“If we had ­another $2m, we could keep more kids healthy physically and mentally.

We do so much with so little, and many of us volunteer our time for these programs.”

One of the participants, Heath Reynolds, now 16, turned up two years ago at a Perth sports centre suffering from significant mental health issues.

“He’s now a senior coach on the basketball team, a peer ambassador and he’s going to school,” Professor Kickett-Tucker said. “I told him he had become ‘Feel the Thunder Thor’ and now everyone calls him Thor.”

Prominent psychiatrist Ian Hickie said community-based and early-intervention services should be the recipients of any ­annual growth in mental health spending, as recommended by a 2014 report by the National ­Mental Health Commission.

“Unlike many other human services areas, due to the younger age of those most affected and the lifetime costs of mental ill-health, it is an area where effective strategies, delivered at scale, have the potential for large returns on ­investment,” he said. “Sadly, the commonwealth ­rejected the recommendation. It still remains the case that without any ­specific intervention, all governments will continue to pour new monies into hospital (beds) first.”