Ask him how it feels to finish a roof and he’ll say, “just good.” Ask him what his youth worker helped him with and he’ll say, “just… open up.” Ask him what he’s learned about himself over the last few years and he’ll sit quietly for a moment, then say something that lands harder than he probably intended.
“I’m the young person I never thought I was.”
He’s a carpentry apprentice now. He gets up early, works hard, and drives past completed rooftops just to look at them — knowing he built that, knowing it’s standing. He goes to Anchor Point, a program within Youth Futures community school. He has friends who followed him there from mainstream school, not because he told them to, but because they heard something different was happening.
It wasn’t always like this.
Before Youth Futures, Chase barely went to school. It wasn’t one thing — it was everything layered on top of everything else. Bullying. Fights. A system that didn’t seem to know what to do with him, or want to try.
His mum fought hard for him during that time. She reached out to schools, to the education department, to anyone who might help. What she got back — more often than not — was silence, or worse, indifference. For a long stretch, Chase was out of school entirely, and the support the family needed was either unavailable or came too late.
“I was pretty desperate,” she says. “I posted on Facebook.”
A friend who worked as a psychiatric nurse replied: “You need to try Youth Futures.”
That was the turning point. Not the system. A friend. A Facebook post. A link.
When Chase arrived at Anchor Point, the change wasn’t instant — but it was real.
“The kids are just nicer,” he says. “They’ve all been through the same stuff. We just get each other.”
Some of his friends from mainstream had followed him there, quietly, without fanfare. The classrooms are small. There’s less noise, less chaos, less of the pressure that made mainstream feel impossible. Chase can listen to music while he works, sit next to his friends, move at a pace that suits him.
“I work better with less people,” he says. “Less drama.”
But more than the environment, it was the staff who made the difference.
Chase talks about a youth worker named Georgia, with the particular quiet of someone describing a person who changed things for them.
“She helped me open up,” he says. “Show the real me.”
When Georgia moved on, Chase continued with another youth worker. The sessions don’t sound complicated from the outside — they just talk, work through what’s hard, figure out how to move forward. But for Chase, they’ve been transformative.
There was one moment he keeps coming back to. A staff member showed him a short video — something about seeing your own worth, about being more than you believe yourself to be.
“How did it make you feel?” he was asked.
“Just good,” he said. Then, after a pause: “I’ll never forget it.”
His mum notices the difference too. “His teachers stay in constant contact with me,” she says. “They have done everything they could to help support him. That’s what matters.”
She pauses. “I am eternally grateful for what they’ve done.”
Chase didn’t always plan to be a carpenter. At ten, he wanted to be an electrician. For a while after that, he didn’t plan much at all.
“I thought I’d just be a high school dropout,” he says. “Sit at home all day.”
Instead, he’s on a building site most mornings, working alongside a boss who believes in him. He finished a roof recently — a job that took about 30 days — and still talks about it like it was yesterday.
“I drive past it now,” he says. “Just to see it.”
Asked how it felt when it was done, he thought for a moment.
“Perfect,” he said. “I built it. It’s perfect.”
There’s something in that word, said by someone who once couldn’t imagine a future — the quiet, solid pride of a young person who has made something that stands.
If Chase had one thing to say to a young person struggling in mainstream school, it would be this:
“There is a light at the end of the tunnel.”
His mum’s message to other parents is gentler, but just as clear:
“There are so many more alternative options. Young people don’t have to be in mainstream school. And it does not matter what your young person is doing — when they start to flourish again, that’s what matters.”
Near the end of our interview, Chase was asked what he’d learned about himself.
He sat with the question for a while.
“I thought I was dumb,” he said eventually. “But then someone showed me I wasn’t.”
He got 100% on a maths test not long ago. He laughed when he mentioned it — half disbelieving, half proud.
Chase’s story isn’t finished. Nobody’s is. But he’s a young person who once couldn’t see a way forward — and who now drives past rooftops he built with his own hands, just to look.
That’s the young person he always was.
Youth Futures supports young people who have disengaged from mainstream education, providing community schools, youth workers, and wraparound support for students and their families.
