Twenty10 celebrates its success

Every week more than 100 gay and lesbian youth come into contact with Twenty10, 26 years after it began providing refugee and crisis care.
The Sydney-based youth service and drop-in centre is celebrating that outstanding work on its nominal birthday this Saturday – the 20th day of the 10th month – but the challenges haven’t diminished.
“The story we hear every day is young people get introduced to drugs and alcohol, and the spiral of never being able to get back into education and needing an income,” Twenty10 executive officer Meredith Turnbull said.
“Twenty10 is shouldering most of the burden when people have fled what they perceive to be their unsafe local communities from around the country, and it still happens in 2007.”
But Sydney is not always going to be safe and supportive, and there isn’t enough crisis accommodation available, so Turnbull said it was often better to take advantage of support networks in a young person’s local community.
New early intervention work includes training for regional and interstate youth centres so they can become extensions of what Twenty10 accomplishes in Sydney.
Turnbull recently began working with a new coalition of mainstream services in the ACT who wanted to do more for their queer clients.
“There’s very little support there. There really needs to be a dedicated gay and lesbian youth service in every state,” she said.
For the clients who are in Sydney, Twenty10’s challenge includes remaining relevant when most homeless people now have mobile phones and email addresses, and most young people in need hear about Twenty10 via the internet.
“We started a series of video workshops with the aim of producing a series of short films that we’re going to upload to YouTube,” Turnbull said.
Twenty10 began using filmmaking as a way of getting its clients to tell their stories with the film Stray earlier this year, written and acted by the young people.
“We’re trying to develop a positive youth community. You don’t need to be accessing everything every day to be involved. So we’ve literally got hundreds that are part of us, and contributing back,” Turnbull said.
The service has youth groups in Manly, Hornsby and Newtown as well as the drop-in centre where a young person can spend all day, have a shower, have something to eat, and have someone to talk to who isn’t going to exploit them.
“As a community we’ve all got a responsibility for these young people,” Turnbull said.
“If you’re in a pub on Oxford Street and you see a young person who you think is too young to be there or is being exploited, maybe you’ve got a role in trying to link them up with us, because we can help.”
More information at www.twenty10.org.au, or call the support line on 8594 9555 or outside Sydney on 1800 652 010.