Bernie Shakeshaft’s Backtrack program keeps kicking goals in his quest to boost youth employment and education.
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Just two weeks after being highlighted as the subject of an award winning documentary, the Armidale based program has received a much needed shot in the arm, of up to $100,000, from the state government.
The boost comes on the back of the program making it into the second round of the Youth Employment Innovation Challenge, designed to find innovative ways to create new jobs in some of the state’s worst unemployment hot spots.
Northern Tablelands MP Adam Marshall said “the BackTrack youth organisation has taken another big step in seeing its creative training project become a working model for youth unemployment across the state.”
“The Back Track program is widely and quite rightly seen as the most successful one of its kind in tackling youth unemployment across this region, and that’s been recognised with this funding and even more opportunity,” he said.
Successful projects that make it through to the third and final stage of the Challenge may be able to access up to $850,000 in funding, with the second round funding available to develop working initiatives into a workable business model – and pitch its inventive ways for the larger funding pool.
The Backtrack program was started by former jackeroo come social worker Mr Shakeshaft in 2006, who took a few troubled teenage boys who were “destined for prison” and put them in a team situation, helping to run a dog jumping show in a team environment.
Since then the foundation remains the same, although has grown significantly in both size and scope.
Recently Mr Shakeshaft took a top gong at the Australian Crime and Violence Prevention Awards, with the program boasting an astounding 87 per cent success rate.
“One of the points of difference is that we are targeting kids from a lower socioeconomic background – kids more likely to spend a lifetime on welfare - they’re the ones we are really targeting,” Mr Shakeshaft said.
He said the aim was to achieve “punchier outcomes”, by getting kids “away from the cops, and not using the health system”, he hopes to make the youths independent and employable.
“The BackTrack model has shown the way in how innovative work and social training can make disadvantaged kids employable – and how it could take them out of the welfare system,” Mr Marshall said.
“What we’ve seen so far has been outstanding because the BackTrack record has shown an 87 per cent success rate in training young people to find jobs.”
