A Youth Insearch Story
As featured on the Tim Fairfax Family Foundation Website
“A Safe Space to Heal and Thrive”
Youth Insearch is a national, peer-led youth trauma recovery organisation, dedicated to supporting at-risk youth, and has a vision that all young people have a safe space to heal and thrive.
Youth Insearch is a national, peer-led youth trauma recovery organisation, dedicated to supporting at-risk youth, and has a vision that all young people have a safe space to heal and thrive.
The organisation believes that young people with lived experience are best placed to support other young people experiencing mental health and life challenges. Youth Insearch aims to create safe spaces within which young people support each other to heal from trauma, make meaningful peer connections, improve mental wellbeing and overcome life challenges. Delivered through weekend workshops, support groups, peer support and leadership, and individual care, Youth Insearch provides a comprehensive early intervention program of counselling, support, mentoring, and empowerment for at-risk young people aged 12-25.
We exist to create a safe place for young people to heal from trauma. Our aim is to see young people heal and thrive.
– Stephen Lewin, CEO
Originating in northwest Sydney in 1985, Youth Insearch’s programs aimed to reach more at-risk youth than was possible via individual counselling. In just two years program outcomes resulted in the closure of over half the Riverstone Police Station operations as youth crime declined. A review of Youth Insearch’s program commissioned by the NSW State Government in 2003 found positive outcomes across multiple behaviour and well-being measures, including significantly less interactions with justice agencies, higher self-esteem, improved relationships, reduced suicidal thoughts and attempts, and reduced alcohol and drug use, and that the program had a sustained positive impact on these issues over time. In its 2022 Annual Report, Youth Insearch reported 91% of its young people who felt suicidal prior to program participation no longer felt suicidal afterwards.
Along with a trauma-informed approach to the delivery of community based mental health services, Youth Insearch offers young people leadership training and employment opportunities. Through weekend workshops, weekly support groups and individual support, it provides a place for young people to form meaningful and lasting peer connections, experience a safe space to talk about the issues in their life, and receive support from trained youth leaders, peer workers and social workers. Youth leaders are past participants in the program and are positive and real examples to the young participants of what is possible despite a negative background. The wrap-around support and advocacy provided by Youth Insearch enables young people to break negative cycles and create lasting change in communities.
A core element of Youth Insearch’s success is its lived-experience peer workers and youth leaders who work within local communities. Perhaps the most prominent example of this is Youth Insearch CEO Stephen Lewin, who was himself a program participant.
“If it wasn’t for Youth Insearch I could have ended up in jail or dead… 80% of young people that come through the Youth Insearch program make a significant positive change in their lives that’s usually permanent and long lasting, and I’m not saying this just as a CEO, I’m saying that as someone who’s experienced it firsthand and it changed my life.”
Stephen joined the Youth Insearch program in Wagga Wagga after a period of homelessness and an arrest and described it as “the first time [he] actually felt connected with people”. The support he found in the program inspired Stephen to join the Youth Insearch Leadership Program, which he described as “life changing”:
“The Youth Insearch Leadership Program was probably the most life changing program that I’ve participated in – and the opportunities that were given to us as trainee leaders, the experiences were just mind-blowing. I spoke at the United Nations assembly event in Sydney as an 18-year-old. I ended up doing the Kokoda trail.”
Stephen turned his experience with Youth Insearch into a career in which he has consistently walked alongside society’s most vulnerable people. He joined Youth Insearch as General Manager in 2014 and was appointed CEO in 2019.
Hear more of Stephen’s story here:
