Committee for Lorne: Schoolies is safely over Thanks to Red Frogs

Red Frogs aims to provide a positive peer presence to young people, as they navigate the alcohol-fuelled environments that
tend to arise in the years post-high school. Lorne sees about 3,500 school leavers on its streets at the conclusion of the school year.

This highly concentrated population of partiers can bring with it complications, both for the Lorne community, and fo these young people who are the future leaders and decision makers of our country. Red Frogs had 54 volunteers in Lorne this
year, each with the sole intention of seeing every school leaver return home safely, having had a positive interaction with the Red Frogs and the wider Lorne community.

In Lorne, Red Frogs has been working under a Surf Coast Shire initiative called Good Times Great Breaks (GTGB) in order to achieve its above mentioned KPIs. This initiative very effectively allows our volunteers to work closely with other organisations in Lorne such as Victoria Police, YSAS (Youth Support and Advocacy Service) and Security in order to facilitate a time of safe celebration.

Essentially, our volunteers are the “ears on the ground”, the surrogate older siblings and the immediate responders in most schoolies-related incidents that occur throughout this time. We’ve found that as a result of years of building trust in the Red Frogs name, we are almost always the first call these schoolies make in every scenario. This enables us to be powerful supporters of the schoolies and other stakeholders who, by our presence, are released to do what they are best qualified for. We can provide the emotional support, so that YSAS can take the lead in scenarios of serious drug and alcohol use; we calm nerves and provide distraction so that security can focus on real risks to safety; we hold hair back over toilets so that ambos can attend to acutely unwell people; and we can direct information to Police in order to preempt deteriorating situations.

The GTGB program allows for us to log and track how effectively we are achieving our mission in Lorne. This year, our “Froggers” logged 54,000 interactions with schoolies over the week. Interactions can be anything as simple as a hello and a high five, to an ambulance call at 5am. As a team, we responded to 149 red or yellow calls, which are situations that may
have warranted the presence of an ambulance if it weren’t for the teamwork between Red Frogs and YSAS. We did 153 pancake cook-ups in various accommodation blocks, which serve as an important distraction technique from binge-drinking culture, and mean the young people are accompanying their alcohol consumption with some food intake. Lastly, our bus drivers safely took 2,335 schoolies off the streets and to their accommodation throughout the week. Statistically, schoolies is one of the most dangerous periods of a person’s life in Australia.

These GTGB numbers reflect the mammoth effort put in by all the safety responders in Lorne to put preventative measures in place before life-altering decisions are made.

This massive effort would not be possible without the generous donation of $10,000 that we have received from the Lorne Op Shop in both 2017 and 2018. It is this money that provides our beds and our meals for the week. Each volunteer frogger pays to be involved, to the tune of over $300pp, but that does not reach anywhere close to covering our expenses.

We would, therefore , like to extend a public thank you to the Lorne Op Shop for so generously allowing us to have impact
on such a large scale in Lorne. Each of our team has such passion to see these young people return to their parents the same way they arrived, and your support has been absolutely critical in ensuring our ability to do so. Finally, thank you to the Lorne community for welcoming us every November. It has become, for many of us, a home away from home.