Guest Speakers Julez Sanders and Stacy Park Uniting Street2Home 18/8/22 Gallery

We were fortunate to have two guest speakers last week from Uniting Ballarat with Barb Glass taking the role of Chair. Juelz Sanders and Stacy Park from Uniting's Street2Home program delivered a very sobering account of the challenges of homeless people in Ballarat. The Street2Home program works with 'rough sleepers'. Within this program Uniting's Assertive Outreach Team provide support and assistance to over 220 people per year while the Supportive Housing Team support and assist over 180 people per year. This work involves over 7000 contacts with clients over the year for the six staff in these two teams. Juelz and Stacy described in detail the impact of the lack of affordable housing in Ballarat on our homeless community members. For example the priority list for those over 25 years of age involves 178 households and the youth priority list includes 57 households.
Despite the near overwhelming statistics outlined by Juelz and Stacy they emphasized their positive outlook and the satisfac- tion all team members have in being able to support and assist some of our community's less fortunate members to access emergency relief, respite and housing. This presentation provided strong evidence to support our Club taking on a major project to provide assistance to Ballarat's homeless people. Barb and I will be following up with Uniting Ballarat to explore the potential for the Club to form a partnership and identify a meaningful project for us to all get behind as we run up to our Centenary year.