I've heard it said
that children are the most
honest barometer
of how we're going as a society.
When I look at what's going on
with our young people today
in Australia — where one in five
kids under the age of 17
don't go to school or have a job,
when one in four kids are suffering
from mental health issues,
when there's 28,000 kids sleeping
rough in this country at the moment —
I say 'that's not good enough'.
When I first moved back
from the Territory to New South Wales
I got this job.
I was supposed to get these 20 kids to
finish school and get them work-ready.
We had one year to do it.
So we got to the end of the year.
One of the kids had passed away,
another one went to jail.
But none of them were work-ready.
My youth work had got to such
a frustrating point in my life
that I decided to
try something different.
I was at this Christmas party,
I didn't really know
who I was talking to,
we we're having a few beers
and I said 'look, all we need to
sort this problem out is a shed'.
About a week later
I get a phone call from this guy
and he says 'do you remember who I am?'.
Turns out he's the CEO of a bank.
He said 'I want you to meet me at this address'.
When I got down to this address,
it was the mayor,
the local member, and the CEO.
They had the keys to an old shed
and he said 'go and sort it out'.
It was a bit of a drama for us
in the initial stages.
We had no funding,
we had no business plan.
So we've got this big empty shed,
we need to fill it with something.
At home I've got this bunch of young
border collie pups
that haven't had much work
and I've got a shed full of
rough and tumble boys.
We put the two of those together,
the pups and the boys
and something magical happened.
It was the first time I'd seen those wild,
tough kids sit cradling
these beautiful little pups. 
And I knew we're on to something.
Thirteen years ago
I started a personal dream
with a handful of volunteers
in an empty shed.
Since that day, we just kept
doing whatever it took
to progress those young people.
If they can't read and write
we teach them to read and write.
If they don't have somewhere to live
we provide somewhere to live.
We even built a business
employing unemployable kids.
We have a welding business,
we have a woodwork business,
we have an agricultural
contract business.
We're doing prevention work
in schools now
and the dogs
are the common denominator.
Our girls program take the dogs to
visit old people in nursing homes.
We now have dogs working in schools
trying to keep kids in school.
When you see a kid that comes in
that is so busted
and so lifeless, and then you hang in
and you do the hard yards —
the parenting, being the uncle,
being the school, being the friend,
being the role model — and you see them
come out the other side,
that's pay day
for us at Backtrack.
