Two Glen Innes councillors have started a campaign to turn the control centre for the RFS in Bourke Street into what they call a “hub” for young people in the town.
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The grand building which used to house the old shire council before it became the premises for the RFS is due to be vacated when the fire people move to new premises up on Lang Street.
Crs Carol Sparks and Dianne Newman are campaigning for the building to be turned into a centre for young people.
They say there’s a need for a place which teenagers can “call their own” in the town. “It would be a focus for people who currently have few places to go apart from the street and the park at night’, they said jointly. It would be “somewhere safe to go”.
There is concern among councillors about the age profile of Glen Innes. Both homes for the aged in the town, for example, are planning expansion, an indication that they expect demand to rise.
The council already has a youth officer but one who doesn’t work in that role for most of the week (though allocating more money to expand that role is now being considered). It has just appointed a person to coordinate the big events like Minerama and the Celtic Festival and her belief before she got the job was that these events needed to shift their focus towards younger participants with less reliance on “grey nomads”.
But how you cater more for youth remains undefined. Does more days for a youth officer help? Or a centre for them? Some would ask whether young people want to be catered for beyond being given the chance of good education and jobs? To find out more, the youth officer has been conducting a survey but the results have not been published yet.
Beyond the council, some outside bodies help young people in distress, like Pathfinders which helps the homeless.
Carol Sparks and Dianne Newman believe that some of these roles could be centralised in a new centre at the old shire council offices. They think other bodies would back the idea but they need the support of the other five councillors who make up Glen Innes Severn Council.
They are the only two women on the council and they say: “As mothers and grandmothers, it would be easy to find reasons not to do this. However, we say we need to act on this now .. to give our kids a sense of belonging in our community.”
It is not clear how such a centre would work or how much it would cost. How much formal control of young people would there be, for example. too much and young people won’t come; too little and disorder might be threatened.
The two councillors say it “would be a place where young people get introduced to different music or ideas. It should be a place of enthusiasm and positiveness. It wouldn't be stuffy and dominated by adults who lectured them, but a congenial, welcoming place where our newest citizens can learn how to grow in the right way.”
