Environmental sustainability

The environment group developed a Youth Native Community Garden Bed in partnership with the Jimboomba Community Garden. We worked collaboratively and collected free trees from the Logan City Council Free Tree program and purchased trees to add to our project.

We had a working bee day with the youth from the Church of Latter-Day Saints and the Jimboomba Community Garden and planted 15 Native trees in the garden bed.

Once the trees were planted, we planned our launch which was held on Saturday 21 October. It was a beautiful sunny day with our families, friends, community, and the Jimboomba Community Garden team.

This garden will be maintained by the young people and activated as a space to host workshops, working bee days, and simply utilised as a meeting space for young people and the community.

Employment and education

We embarked on a social media campaign covering topics such as soft skills, critical thinking, and communication skills. As technology is the main source of information in this current time, we decided to create short bite-sized videos to share on our social media page.

In addition to our small bite-size videos, we were instrumental in launching an employability skills workshop to prepare for jobs, job interviews, resume writing and public speaking. This workshop was delivered to our LYAG members on 12 October which emphasised the need for more similar workshops to help our young people thrive. The workshop was well received by the participants, built good connections amongst the team, and helped with confidence and self-esteem which was good to see.

Health and wellbeing

Our group held several meetings to collaborate our ideas on what we could do together to respond to the continuous rise in poor youth mental health and homelessness.

We settled with hosting a fundraiser BBQ to raise funds for 50 youth homeless care packs, which consist of toiletry items for 25 females and 25 males who are at risk of homelessness or simply needing a hand up.

We held a BBQ Fundraiser at Bunnings Loganholme on 15 October where we raised $814.45, a huge success being our first fundraiser. We also received donation vouchers from Coles of $30, Woolworths of $50 and $500 from Uniting Care for the Child Protection Week promotion video LYAG put together. These funds and donations helped us create our care packs which were donated to Youth Off the Streets, a local youth outreach not-for-profit organisation that works with young people experiencing homelessness.

These packs are a testament to our commitment to making a positive impact on the lives of those less fortunate.

Community safety

The Community Safety team focussed on vaping awareness for Logan youth. We met and brainstormed safety issues concerning our youth and we found vaping is increasing exponentially, within Logan youth and in general.

The team concluded that an educational and engaging approach was required to reach youth minds, to prevent more youth falling victim to the vaping culture. An approach by young people for young people.

We created a partnership with stakeholders from the Logan Youth Network (LYN) consisting of the University of Queensland (UQ) National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research (NCYSUR), Metro South Health, Youth Support Services, Logan Youth Foyer Support Services and TAFE Qld-Loganlea Campus.

The workshop was delivered at Woodridge State High School to students from Grades 7 to 9, on 3 October. Since delivery of this vaping workshop, we’ve had several schools and a not-for-profit organisation requesting the workshop be delivered to their young people.