Reconnect and Newly Arrived Youth Support Service (NAYSS)
The Reconnect program uses community based early intervention services to assist young people aged 12 to 18 years who are homeless or at risk of homelessness and their families. Reconnect assists young people to stabilise their living situation and improve their level of engagement with family, work, education, training and their local community.
Reconnect breaks the cycle of homelessness by providing counselling, group work, mediation and practical support to the whole family. Reconnect providers also ‘buy in’ services to target individual needs of clients, such as specialised mental health services.
NAYSS provides a multi-function service to newly arrived young people aged 12 to 21 years from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, who are homeless or at risk of homelessness and their families.
NAYSS providers assist newly arrived young people by providing services relevant to them at all stages along the continuum of assistance from early intervention to transitional support. It aims to increase the participation of newly arrived young people in the economic and social life of the Australian community.
Reconnect and NAYSS providers follow the seven Good Practice Principles:
- Accessibility of services
- Client driven service delivery
- Holistic approaches to service delivery
- Working collaboratively
- Culturally and contextually appropriate service delivery
- Ongoing review and evaluation
- Building sustainability.
These Good Practice Principles are strategies that services have identified through research as achieving positive outcomes for their clients and communities. For further information on the Good Practice Principles, please refer to the Reconnect Program Guidelines.
Action Research is a key component of Reconnect and NAYSS. For early intervention methods to be effective, services need to respond to their clients’ needs using a reflective and improvement orientated approach to service delivery. Action Research is a mechanism used to achieve this and is considered integral to Reconnect and NAYSS.