Embarking upon direct service delivery for the first time

The Refugee Job Placement, Employment and Training (JPET) program was an augmented model of a ‘mainstream’ service, tailored to specifically meet the needs of refugee and newly arrived young people. The JPET program was funded by the Commonwealth Government in a pilot phase, trialled in a number of locations from 1993 for young people at risk of homelessness, before being rolled out nationally in 1997. The Ethnic Youth Issues Network would continue to provide the program until 2006, when federal government changes to JPET meant it lost the ability to offer specialist services and the organisation decided not to re-tender for the program. EYIN, and then later CMY, would continue to follow the same fundamental approach to service delivery into the future, in which they would offer youth-specific, multicultural programs that filled existing service gaps and that this work would inform their policy advocacy work ensuring a direct connection with the ‘on-the-ground’ realities for both workers and young people.