Brain food

New not-for-profit on the block STREAT are working with young people to help find a way out of homelessness. STREAT provides hospitality training for young people and wrap around social support while they conduct their training. Combine this with work experience and employment opportunities in the organisations street food cart, and you’ve got a promising new social enterprise. STREAT offers at risk and homeless young people the opportunity to learn, earn and see their food get sold! And customers come away with a tasty feed!

We had the treat of talking to CEO Rebecca Scott about what’s worked, what hasn’t and how technology has helped STREAT make the program a success.

A/N: Why is there a need for your program?
There’s more than 105,000 people are homeless in Australia every night. This has often been seen as a huge and tractable social issue, and the numbers continue to grow. Nearly 18,000 of the homeless are young people aged 12-18. And 58% are unemployed and looking for work.

A/N: Why does STREAT want to work with young people?
We want to work with young people because they’re at a really formative part of their life, where addressing the issues can prevent entrenched homelessness. The other thing that I really like about working with this age group is that even though they’ve gone through some horrific experiences in their lives, there’s still an optimism and a hope there for the future, and an energy which can be harnessed and moulded to change their lives.

Photographer : STREAT

A/N: How did STREAT get started? Were young people involved in the process?
A lot of the conceptualisation of STREAT was based on the best practices of other social enterprises internationally, and also working closely with social support agencies on the ground who work with young people.

We have a formal review process where we engage the youth in reviewing every part of the current program, and their feedback is critical particularly in this early startup phase and before we recruit Class Two. So we will increasingly incorporate youth involvement into our system.

A/N: Why have you decided to launch as a social enterprise rather than a non-profit?
A social enterprise long-term can be far more financially sustainable because it has the ability to generate its own revenue stream, rather than constantly having its handout. Rather than being a normal charity, customers are solving a social problem while getting a product or service that they genuinely want. It’s a far stronger two-way transaction.



A/N: How have you been using technology in your programs?
STREAT has really embraced web 2.0 technology. We use our website as a major platform to do things from fundraising via our donations page, to online merchandising. We put our recruitment materials up online, and we like to think that our blog makes lots of people—potential volunteers, trainees, donors, food consumers—know and like us.

From more of an infrastructure/operations viewpoint, we’re also integrating all of our systems with Salesforce, an online customer relationship manager that will allow us to run our finances, contact management, case management and coffee merchandising from one platform that lives in the cloud. Salesforce gives 10 licenses free to nonprofits (generous!) and we’ve customised it to suit our needs. It should allow us to do things like text our trainees and track their engagement with our 6-month program by how much they respond using technology.

We’re trying to use technology as intuitively as most of our youth do. Most of the young people today have grown up using Facebook and the internet, so as a youth-focused organisation we should too.

A/N: What has and hasn’t worked in terms of working with technology based, online or multimedia campaigns/programs?
It’s very early days yet to tell what is and isn’t working for us, but I do have to say that so far our use of social media (from FaceBook, Twitter and our blog) has brought us benefits. We’ve had volunteers contact us through Twitter, and people offer to fundraise for us based on nothing but what they know about STREAT from our website. In an ideal world our use of technology will make people relate to us more and care about youth homelessness, realising that the fabric of our society depends on everyone’s wellbeing.

One thing to remember is that technology is an enabling tool to reach people, but it takes time and constant work to create a community. So technology isn’t some magic pill; it just allows us to reach people around the globe, if we keep up the effort on our side.

Photographer : STREAT

A/N: What lies ahead for STREAT?
Ambitious goals of scaling our enterprise firstly within Melbourne, and then hopefully beyond, without losing sight that each new enterprise provides training and employment for more young people. The bigger we grow, the bigger the impact we make on young lives. Let us know how we’re doing on our website.

 

 

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