Water money for Indigenous youth

CENTRAL Highlands Water staff have donated to one of the region’s Indigenous support services with proceeds from the recent Begonia Festival.

The cash was raised through the sale of Choose Tap reusable bottles, with all funds going towards the utility’s community partner The Ballarat and District Aboriginal Co-operative.

BADAC staff were presented with a cheque for nearly $15,000 to help run their youth engagement programs and CEO Karen Heap said the support is a welcome one.

“It’s really important to give them options to see other things,” she said. “It’s important to have a positive impact instead of a negative one.

“We should be funding these sorts of programs for kids to get an experience of life and different things. A lot of these children wouldn’t have had that opportunity.”

A 2021 Australian Bureau of Statistics study estimates 54 per cent of the 4300 people able to access BADAC’s service are aged under 24 years old.

BADAC’s cultural and therapeutic team manager and CHW independent Aboriginal delegate Shu Brown said the youth programs are about connecting First Nations young people to their culture.

“For kids to get out here like this it’s so important for them to be out in country,” he said. “They’ll be doing dance practices tonight.

“During the week we had our men’s youth group go out and make spears, boomerangs, and clap sticks. More cultural activities like that would be fantastic.

“It’s really hard because we’re pretty underfunded when it comes to children and youth services programs, and highly funded in programs like youth justice.”

About 40 kids currently attend BADAC’s youth group meetings on Monday nights.

BADAC was announced as CHW’s community partner last year, and the latter’s managing director Jeff Haydon said the donation is the largest they’ve given to the group.

“We had 65,000 people attend the Begonia Festival in record crowds which resulted in record sales of our bottles,” he said.

“BADAC makes a big difference to small organisations that do fantastic work supporting our local Aboriginals in our community especially with their youth programs.”