history of Youthsafe

A brief history of Youthsafe

Youthsafe was started by Associate Professor John Yeo in 1982 as the ground-breaking, world first ‘Awareness and Prevention Program’, initially run out of a small office in the Spinal Injuries Unit at Royal North Shore Hospital, and later registered as a company called Spinesafe.

Spinesafe targeted school-aged children and young people to demonstrate how easily a spinal cord injury can occur in everyday life situations, what its devastating impacts can be and how it can be prevented.

The interactive program was successfully delivered by wheelchair presenters, all of whom had a permanent spinal cord injury, to about 1.5 million children in infants, primary and secondary schools across Sydney.

In 1999 the organisation, under the leadership of Dr. James Middleton, adopted the name Youthsafe recognising that young people were more at risk of serious unintentional injury than any other age group and that the strategies for preventing spinal cord injury could be equally applicable to a broader range of injuries.

The program focus shifted from presenters’ personal stories to an evidence-based classroom session that aligned with the school curriculum and fostered the knowledge and skills to empower young people to identify and manage commonly occurring risks in their own lives. Teacher resources were developed in consultation with NSW Department of Education and Training, with funding support from the then Motor Accidents Authority of NSW, NSW Health and the NRMA.

Shifting the focus from the cautionary stories of “lived experience” – and rejecting scare tactics - in favour of a strength-based education program, Youthsafe laid the foundations upon which program and service diversification quickly flourished.

In these seminal years, Youthsafe’s programming addressed high injury risk with an expanded focus on road use, school-to-work transitions, team sports and socialising in private and public venues.

In these early years of the twenty-first century, Youthsafe also began to more vigorously pursue social justice goals knowing that the higher injury risk of young people is further exacerbated by disadvantage. This has provided the ongoing motivation to target at risk youth populations and to partner with key community influencers across CALD, low socioeconomic, regional and isolated communities over the last two decades. A commitment that continues to the present day with a variety of community-based partners.

Research and innovation have played a key role in Youthsafe’s project responsiveness, coupled with the values of partnership, co-design and active collaboration.

An early, multiple award-winning examples of this is SafeClub, a sports safety training program designed for community sports clubs to create safer sporting environments; developed in partnership with Northern Sydney Central Coast Area Health Service.