our story.
Kick Back is kicking back against the idea that any young person belongs in the too hard basket. In fact, we don’t even think the thing exists.
We’re a Youth Development and Social Justice movement innovating for change and kicking back against the status quo.
Our mission?
To do our part in the fight to end the injustice of homelessness that is facing our rangatahi!
You see, we have this crazy idea that no young person is too “at-risk” to Love. That Love takes risks. That healing, transformation, change, it happens when we have the courage to step into solidarity with one another. That Love goes further, it seeks out the forgotten places, the rejected spaces, it goes to those whom society has chosen to ignore. Those who have been marginalised by the systems and structures we’ve designed to serve the majority. That Love seeks out the margins, sets camp in the gaps, refusing to accept the unacceptable within society.
And youth homelessness is unacceptable.
No young person should ever experience homelessness within Aotearoa.
No child should be without a home.
No rangatahi should be on our streets.
Currently, if you experience homelessness as an adult, there is more support available to you than there is to a young person in desperate need of help. This is despite the reality that rangatahi experience homelessness at disproportionately high rates within Aotearoa. To put some detail behind this, of the 41,644 people who were experiencing homelessness at the time of the 2018 Census, half were 25 years old or younger. And sixty per cent of Māori experiencing homelessness were under 25.
A 2022 report commissioned by Manaaki Rangatahi (a collective working together to end youth homelessness), and conducted by Ngā Wai a te Tui, the Māori and Indigenous Research Centre, highlighted the significant gaps that exist when it comes to serving rangatahi who experience homelessness.
This injustice has been ignored for too long.
So, we’re Kicking Back, committing ourselves to doing our part to ensure that the injustice of homelessness is well and truly ended.
And we know it’s possible.
We at Kick Back believe that by focusing on preventing and ending youth homelessness, we will go a long way to ending Homelessness all together within Aotearoa.
Our purpose is to serve those rangatahi that exist in the gaps, to innovate and drive change by embodying it. Our work is focused on piloting and developing innovative solutions to youth homelessness, seeking to develop evidence and expand our collective mātauranga, in order to gift what we learn to the sector, and in doing so to drive change further and faster.
Our focus is on developing solutions for those who have been most structurally marginalised within our society. Serving the gaps, in order to build the knowledge and expertise needed to close them.
Kick Back believes that Te Ara o Te Aroha, that Love is The Way. That when we embody Love and ensure this sits at the base of how we move and operate in the world, that magic happens.
the vision.
Our vision is to drive innovation within the Youth Housing and Homelessness sector, in order to close the gaps within services and supports for our rangatahi. Our focus is on designing services for our most structurally marginalised and underserved rangatahi. We believe that by focusing on the margins, we can create services and systems, that serve all our rangatahi.
development of a youth housing continuum.
Currently there is a clear lack of a comprehensive strategy to prevent and end youth homelessness within Aotearoa. There is a lot of work needed to ensure that such a strategy is completed. Kick Back is playing it’s part, through collective advocacy and collaboration, to ensure that such a strategy is designed and implemented.
However, within such a strategy, there will be a need for a continuum within the housing sector which allows for young people to move through, gaining access to various supports as they need them. Currently, no such continuum exists.
Services are largely disconnected from one another, with many services which may be in the position to serve rangatahi experiencing homelessness, largely unaware of the issue and thus ill-equipped to modify their services in order to meet this need. We also lack key, specialised services, for specific cohorts within our rangatahi community, from Immediate Crisis services, to services designed to serve rangatahi with FASD and other intellectual disabilities, to specialised Mental health and addiction services.
These gaps within the sector need to be closed if we are going to collectively be able adequately serve our rangatahi and build a system and structure that can empower our communities to prevent and end youth homelessness. Our initial projects focus on gaps within the sector currently, that would enable such a continuum to be created.