Our Team
RICK BOLAND | Founder
I grew up here, on the Mornington Peninsula, single mum, broken family, poor. My story is just a link in a chain of many others that grew up here in the same and varying circumstances and environments. Not the best student in school, school leaver at the age of 15, and all-round slacker and vagabond after that, couch surfing and wheeling & dealing with all the unsavory characters around Rosebud.
It wasn’t until I suffered two consecutive mental breakdowns in my early twenties that I had a chance to step back, live inside myself for a while and reflect on all the detrimental qualities in my life that had led me to this point.
Now, just breaking Thirty, I am a qualified Youth Worker.
Why Youth Work?
It’s not because I have any lofty ideas that I’m going to change the world or even the place I live, it’s because I believe in one simple idea: That we CAN Do Better. And if my story is any kind of narrative to reference off, that we have an innate ability in all of us to change that narrative when the old one isn’t working for us.
But who’s asking the young people of our community what their narrative is?
And who’s holding the pen? It certainly isn’t the young people themselves, the true authors of their lives. Often that power is taken away from them, and at the crucial stages of their lives, when they are seeking out their identities, they are told what, or who to be.
Never one to listen to any advice given to me as a teenager, I’m not here to do that now. I simply want to stand beside them and ask the questions that guide them to realizing the power they hold within themselves to create an authentic life.