By Teresa Jayet, Chief Executive Officer, Mallee Family Care

This opinion piece was first published in Sunraysia Daily on 30 October 2026 under the headline “Proposed Foyer for youth.”

It is hard to think about your school assignment when you don’t know where you will sleep tonight. When a young person in Mildura loses a safe place to live, school is often the first thing to go. Every week away from study makes the road back longer, and too many young people in our region never find their way back.

The young people who come to Mallee Family Care with nowhere to live rarely have just one problem. Family violence is almost always part of the story. Some have spent years protecting their mum from the person hurting her and leave home carrying guilt and shame no teenager should carry. Without a safe place to stay, many are mistreated, often by individuals exploiting the gaps in young people’s lives left by system and family collapse.

And we are seeing more young people in this situation, not fewer. At the 2021 Census, 192 people under 24 were homeless in Mildura, up from 104 five years earlier. Unfortunately, from what we see every day, we expect that trend has continued.

It doesn’t have to be this way. An Education First Youth Foyer gives young people a home and a future. With a state election on 28 November, Mildura has a real chance to get one.

An Education First Youth Foyer is not a crisis bed. Young people aged 16 to 24 live on a TAFE campus for up to two years, with staff on site around the clock, and commit to study, training or work. The idea is simple: young people do better when someone believes in them and backs them for the long haul.

These Foyers are already saving young people’s lives. When I visited established Foyers in other locations in Victoria, every young person I spoke with told me it changed their life. We need this for our young people; we need to bring a Foyer to Mildura.

This is what a Foyer looks like - staff helping young people get their licence, cook a meal, do the grocery shopping or pay a bill online. These are things most of us learned because someone once showed us how. For a young person without that someone, a Foyer fills the gap with staff who have the skills and care to support them.

The evidence backs this up: 93% of young people leave a Foyer for secure housing, and 89% are in education, work or both when they finish.

The path isn’t always smooth, and we don’t pretend otherwise. But a Foyer tells young people: we believe in you, and you won’t have to do this on your own. For families where poverty and violence have been passed down through generations, that message can be the circuit-breaker.

In Mildura, the groundwork is done. Our proposed Foyer would sit on the SuniTAFE campus, next door to La Trobe University, so a young person could move from a safe bed to a TAFE certificate and on to a degree without leaving town. That matters in a region where too many young people leave to study and never come back. SuniTAFE has offered the site, the design has been independently costed, and the Brotherhood of St Laurence would guide the practice. It would also create nine ongoing local jobs.

Successive Victorian governments have backed regional Foyers in Shepparton, Wodonga and now Wangaratta. Mallee Family Care is asking every party and candidate to extend that support to the Mallee with a commitment of $2.3 million a year to run a Foyer in Mildura. That would let us seek Commonwealth funding to build it.

I look forward to talking with everyone standing for election in our region about a Foyer for Mildura. The site is ready, the model is proven and our people are ready to start. Whoever forms the next government has the chance to secure the future of our young people in Mildura and to let them know that they matter. I hope they take it.

Teresa Jayet is Chief Executive Officer of Mallee Family Care.
Authorised by Teresa Jayet, Mallee Family Care, 122 Ninth Street, Mildura VIC 3500