Toys Change Lives: Behind Brushes Not Bars

Toys Change Lives is too-valuable a program for previously incarcerated or at-risk Indigenous youth, helping them to get their lives back on track, to be discontinued because of the fallout from Covid-19. The Casino-based program not only reduces recidivism – at a massive saving to the Australian taxpayer – and helps “close the gap” but benefits the whole community.

At the toyshop with a difference in Casino, northern NSW, the young people are fully waged to participate in a carpentry and art-making program run by Indigenous mentors, who teach them practical skills as a pathway to employment and reconnect them with culture. As the charity founder Peter Boughey says: “The boys in detention are disinterested and disengaged, but once you start talking about culture you get their attention and their attitudes change. At Toys Change Lives we don’t do something for the participants, we do something with them.”

The practical, grass-roots project has had incredible results, with 22 of 24 participants not only not re-offending (compared to the regional average of 75% returning to juvenile detention), but getting jobs in youth counselling and the building industry, for example. At TCL, it costs about $20K a year to employ one participant (and $40,000 to employ one Indigenous mentor) compared to about $500K a year to incarcerate them. The TCL program has saved the Australian taxpayer millions of dollars.

Before Covid-19, the successful program had been funded by sales at markets, events, it’s workshop/gallery and through a gift wholesaler as well as the odd grant and philanthropic donation. But Covid-19 cancelled everything. TCL is in urgent need of immediate funds to get it back up and running again - $80,000 to be exact, to pay the two Indigenous mentors to teach the youth. It is a too-important project for so many reasons to stop.

The program started when Peter, a long-time chaplain at Grafton’s Acmena juvenile detention centre, saw the same Indigenous youth returning to the centre time and time again and realised they needed a project to get involved in after they were released to help stop re-offending. In 2014 he set up charity Keeping Our Freedom Youth Indigenous Corporation (KOFY) to employ young people out of detention and at-risk youth, under the guidance and tutelage of Indigenous mentors, to help them build a work history and new skills sets for future employment opportunities under the program name “Toys Change Lives”. 

To directly help break the cycle of youth detention, create employment opportunities for at-risk youth, and help these young people get their lives back on track – as well as benefit the entire community – please donate any amount you can - every bit helps - and share the fundraiser with your audience, electorate, friends, colleagues, corporates and philanthropists.

You can donate on the website: Tcl.org.au.