There’s a sea of programs supporting young people, but once they end, participants tend to lose the relationships and connections they’ve built over the course of those programs.
This motivated Jessy Hall, Managing Director of Pathfinders NT, to start the social enterprise three years ago – to provide consistent and long-term mentoring and support for young people in the Top End.
Pathfinders NT aims to run programs and provide opportunities for young people to reconnect at various touchpoints throughout their journey into adulthood. With the help of its 13 staff members, the enterprise is now supporting 500 young people a year and starting to build a good reputation as a quality service provider in the NT.
At the THRIVE National Youth Summit, Mr Hall will discuss how nature contributes to building physical, mental and emotional resilience among young people. Learn more about the topic through our Q&A session with him.
How do positive role models help young people navigate setbacks and adversity?
Everyone has an example of a mentor or family member who has gone out of the way to recognise them as a person, along with their gifts and talents, and continue with them on their journey, regardless of how often or little they see each other.
Having at least one significant other who truly listens and believes in you is enough to protect against adversities such as early developmental trauma. That significant other doesn’t have to be a family member; it could be a youth worker or a teacher. Having them unconditionally support, admire and guide you is probably one of the biggest protective factors against ill mental health, homelessness and a lot of the issues that young people are facing today.
That’s what we try to provide with our mentoring and the different streams that we draw from in terms of funding and pathways. Whether they come in for one, two or six months of sessions, after that has expired, we will find other ways to engage them and make sure that our mentors continue that connection for as long as that young person needs. That’s probably the most integral part of mentorship.
What is the role of nature and the environment in talks about community and resilience?
As we grow up and move on as a society, we’re starting to become a lot more digitally focused. That’s the reality of the world that we live in. Unfortunately, young minds are the ones most affected by it.
We focus a lot of our support sessions and programs around the outdoors and activities done in nature or outside their home or school because we know that for centuries, connection to nature has been such an integral part of human growth and development. That’s missing a lot in the growth of young people and adolescents these days.
We can all think back to when we were still growing up. A lot of millennials and older generations will tell you that it was always about being outside and exploring your community. That connection to nature and community is so important for social, emotional and mental health. In our programs, whether it’s one-to-one or a camp for five days, they’ve got no access to technology and have to engage with nature.
We see the benefits all the time. And when the young people we support are connected to nature without us having to force them to connect and just doing their everyday activities outside, that’s when they get those natural benefits. This is why we have a strong focus on delivering outdoor health and nature therapy programs.
How does therapeutic intentional programming support healthy life transitions?
Therapeutic conversations coming from the mentoring relationship – whether a narrative storytelling to help young people read, using nature to draw analogies for the issues that they might be having in life or having discussions around positive and harmful relationships – protect and help young people grow through these pivotal stages, particularly in adolescence, when the brain is still developing.
Instead of helping the brain develop, technology is doing the opposite. We should use it only where it’s needed and use the therapeutic relationship built through consistent mentoring to teach life and social skills. Sometimes, even driving is one of the most therapeutic ways to talk because it allows the young person to avoid eye contact, which can often be a hard skill to master, and open up more as they can engage on their terms. They can’t be what they can’t see. The job of the mentor is to provide affordances (learning opportunities) and role model the skills that they will need to succeed.
What should people look forward to in your upcoming session?
A good one to look forward to is Outdoor Health Australia, the peak body delivering, designing and researching the benefits of being in nature and outdoors and having intentional therapeutic practices in those spaces.
Also, we’ve got a young person joining us at the forum who’s going to share some of his experiences from a therapeutic rights and passage program that he attended last year. He will talk about what the ongoing mentorship is meant to end, some of the other opportunities that have come out of that and how he’s going to step up as a leader in his community for his peers. Watch out for that one. That’ll be very special.
Catch Jessy Hall as he talks about how nature supports young people to tackle life’s challenges and opportunities. Register for THRIVE 2025 here.
Geraldine is currently the Content Producer for Third Sector, an Akolade channel. Throughout her career, she has written for various industries and international audiences. Her love for writing extends beyond the corporate world, as she also works as a volunteer writer at her local church. Aside from writing, she is also fond of joining fun runs and watching musicals.
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