Source: Infoxchange Australia [Andrew Locock]

Five years ago, Bronwyn Morkham didn’t know anything about young people in nursing homes, and why it was an issue.

Now she is the national director of the Young People in Nursing Homes National Alliance, which advocates for the approximately 6500 people with a disability who are less than 65 years of age, and have been placed in aged care because there is nowhere else for them to go.

The alliance was spawned from a summit on the needs of young people in nursing homes that Bronwyn organised in 2002 as a favour to a friend.

Having just finished her doctorate thesis and lecturing in film studies at the University of Melbourne at the time, Bronwyn was looking forward to taking a break until she was asked to arrange the one-day summit in just five weeks.

"I like to learn about things I know nothing about, so I said, yes, I'd give them a hand to help get the summit set up," she recalls.

Expecting about 40 or 50 people to attend, Bronwyn was "knocked over in the rush" by 180 people from right across the sector, from service providers to policy makers and, most importantly, the young people and their families.

"(There were) two things everybody that day agreed on – one was that we had to call for the federal government to take this up and provide leadership because it was a national issue. The second thing was that we needed a national voice and so my job became after that to raise the national alliance and get it up and running."

Bronwyn’s natural sense of social justice was a large factor in deciding to take on the challenging role, and she felt she couldn’t walk away from the young people she had met. She contacted existing support groups from around the country to help form the Young People in Nursing Homes National Alliance.

With representatives in every state and territory, Bronwyn’s role demands she be a "jack of all trades", and ranges from policy development to media management to educating students with an interest in the issue.

And it didn’t take long for the alliance’s goal of helping young Australians in nursing homes pursue prosperous lives in the community to begin to be realised. In February 2006, the Council of Australian Governments announced a five-year, $244 million program for 1000 people aged 50 and under.

"One of our key criteria was to offer young people and their families a voice. It wasn’t up to us to stand out there and say what we thought they should have, it was up to them to say for themselves. So they were the ones at the forefront of the campaign," Bronwyn says.

Bronwyn is keen to stress it is only the first step, as she calculates it costs about $80 to $100,000 per year to support a person with high support needs in the community. But the alliance’s campaigning ability is limited because of its reliance on philanthropic funds to function, and Bronwyn must shortly begin the search for extra funding yet again.

"That’s not helpful because the philanthropic community has been wonderfully supportive but there’s a lot of people that need their help and they have finally said to us, ‘we think you’re doing a great job, you’ve achieved wonderful things, but we need to help others’ and I agree with them, I think that’s right," she says.

However, Bronwyn’s passion for her chosen cause is evident, and she is not about to give up any time soon.

"I think if you asked anybody in the community what they thought of this issue, they would say it’s wrong," she says.

"This is about people’s lives and for many of these young people, if they don’t get the support they need their lives are going to be unnecessarily shortened."