The Bridgewater Youth Hub project has reached the next stage where our community and in particular our young people will be driving what the long awaited Youth Hub for Bridgewater is to be. This will include what sorts of things will happen at the Hub, the culture and atmosphere of the Hub, the services that young people want to access directly and what it will physically look like. It will be a true bottom up, co-creation process with our local young people at the centre, in order to bring the Bridgewater Youth Hub to life.

In 2023 Council agreed to progress the Bridgewater Youth Hub in partnership with the Tasmanian Aboriginal Legal Service (TALS). A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for the project was endorsed by Council and signed in December 2023.

This is a justice reinvestment project that will begin by bringing the community together to identify the best way to nurture and grow our young people, prevent and reduce young people’s contact with the criminal justice system, and using the strengths and voice of young people, cultural knowledge, lived experience and data, to design what will work best for our youth. This is an important change in how society and governments have previously seen initiatives like this and shifts the decision making power and responsibility to the community level.

The Bridgewater Youth Hub will have a particular focus on Tasmanian Aboriginal youth and their families but will be for all of community.

TALS has recently appointed Joselle Griffin as the dedicated place based worker to drive this community engagement process for the youth hub, in collaboration with Brighton Council, the Brighton Youth Action Group (BYAG) and the Brighton Alive Youth Action Network.

A draft Community Engagement Plan is being developed and it has already been identified that Kutalayna Collective’s Winterfest, to be held in August this year in conjunction with Material Institute, will provide an ideal opportunity to let the broader community and young people know the project is kicking off and provide an opportunity to begin working on ideas.

Council’s role in the project is to identify the best available site for the Youth Hub, manage the land that the Hub will be located on and apply for grants to fund the construction of what will be a unique youth hub space. It is hoped that Bridgewater will lead the way in fostering a strengths based approach to justice reinvestment and diversion programs for Tasmania.