Ngalla Maya: A Training Program Saving Lives by Helping Indigenous Inmates into work
By the National Reporting Team’s Kate Wild (6 May 2016)
Photo: Mervyn Eades was in out of prison for almost two decades. (ABC News: Kate Wild)
Related Story: Calls for Government to address Indigenous suicide ‘epidemic’
Mervyn Eades spent close to two decades in and out of prison.
“I grew up down in the bush with the old people. I was 10 years old when my dad died,” he said.
“As far as incarceration, that’s been the majority of my life.”
Audio: Listen to Kate Wild’s report on AM (AM)
He was in and out of juvenile detention from the age of 13. He graduated to the adult prison at 18 and was in and out of there until he turned 31.
Mr Eades, an Aboriginal man from Western Australia, saw people die from suicide on both sides of the prison walls, including his younger brother.
“A lot of our boys and sisters and our youth, they just give up and many have taken their lives in the prison system,” he said.
“Throughout my years from 13 to 31, I’ve seen nine or maybe 10 suicides.”
The first year out of prison is a dangerous time for former inmates, according to researchers.
The risk of death from substance abuse and suicide is elevated in the first 12 months on the outside.
After witnessing this first-hand, Mervyn Eades decided to act.
“I created a business of my own when I got out of prison and I made it a reality nearly two years ago now and I created Ngalla Maya, Aboriginal employment access,” he said.
Ngalla Maya provides basic literacy and numeracy education for participants in a range of West Australian prisons and juvenile centres.
It organises job-training placements that prepare people for a range of industries and mentors them the whole way through.
Mr Eades said his program was saving lives.
If you or anyone you know needs help:
- Lifeline on 13 11 14
- Kids Helpline on 1800 551 800
- MensLine Australia on 1300 789 978
- Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467
- Beyond Blue on 1300 22 46 36
- Headspace on 1800 650 890
- QLife on 1800 184 527
“They go into the workforce and that gives them back that self-worth that they never had — our brothers and sisters need that second chance.”
In the last 18 months Ngalla Maya has helped 80 people into full-time work and 160 into study or training placements.
Getting a job has helped many of those people battle grief, and more importantly has given them hope, Mr Eades said.
“It also self-empowers our people. They’ve lost so much hope as it is,” he said.
“Our boys and girls coming out of the prisons going back into that same environment — drugs, alcohol — a lot of our brothers and sisters turn to that dark side and it’s around that hope. It’s all about hope.”
Work offers life after jail for WA inmates
Neda Vanovac (AAP•6 May 2016)
By the time he was 13, Mervyn Eades had lost his grandparents and father, bounced around care homes and ended up in jail.
He spent the next 18 years in and out of prison before getting out for good at the age of 31.
But shortly afterwards he was devastated by the suicide of his baby brother while in jail.
“I constantly visited him. I never saw no signs of suicide, but he took his life – wrote a letter three days before he died, a letter for his family, reckoned he couldn’t cope no more,” Mr Eades told AAP.
His brother had been in juvenile detention since he was 15.
“It was just too much for a young fella to deal with,” Mr Eades said, in Alice Springs for the national conference to prevent indigenous suicide.
“That shattered me and took me a long time to get over, but at the same time I knew our people needed something in the community to stop the recidivism.”
Nineteen months ago he founded Ngalla Maya, a West Australian non-profit organisation that mentors and trains newly released prisoners and finds them work.
“The courses I did in prison, the only ones I did was for parole because you had to, nothing realistic was there for after prison,” he said.
So far 160 people have gone through the doors and 80 are in permanent work, doing everything from commercial cooking, welding, carpentry, and bricklaying to cleaning and hospitality.
“A lot of our people experience death within our family groups … and a lot of our people feel they don’t have no one in the world looking out for them,” Mr Eades said.
“Because of our level of poverty in our community, we have no social or economic devices for our people. We’re just dependent on the welfare system, and the welfare system is destroying our people and takes us away from the reality of life.
“In and out of prison, we lose that connection to culture and identity, who we are and where we belong in society. With no elders around, it destroys us.”
Meaningful work got people back on their feet and restored their self-esteem, helping to buffer them against the risk of depression and suicide, Mr Eades said, although they also needed access to housing and health services to keep flying straight.
Employers didn’t care if their new workers were ex-criminals, as long as they could work, he said: “It opens doors for them, and realistic opportunities.”
Now 46, he’s proud to be there for his sons, who are young men connected to their family and Noongar culture.
“With the life I’ve been through, I’m really amazed and happy that I’m actually here and turned my life around,” Mr Eades said.
LIFE IN AUSTRALIAN PRISONS:
- More than 80 per cent of the prison population has not completed Year 12.
- Only 40 per cent have finished Year 9.
- One in 13 Aboriginal males in WA are in prison, one of the world’s highest jailing rates.
- In the first year post-release, they are 10 times more likely to suicide than while imprisoned.
- Suicide is the leading cause of death for Aboriginal people aged 15-35.
(SOURCE: Gerry Georgatos, researcher at the Institute of Social Justice and Human Rights, May 2016)
How This Program For Former Prisoners Is Completely Changing Lives
“Coming out to nothing, not being able to support your family… it creates a helplessness.”
Huffington Post NEWS (08/08/2017)
Mervyn Eades was worried.
For three years his not-for-profit, which mentors former prisoners back to work, had been running off a shallow well of money — and the well was nearly dry.
The not-for-profit, based in the Perth suburb of Belmont, is called ‘Ngalla Maya’ — a Noongar phrase meaning ‘our place’.
Ngalla Maya had had its phones disconnected and electricity wasn’t far behind when Eades received a phone call from one of his former clients, a young man who’d gone from prison to Ngalla Maya to a job that earned him — in Eades’ words — good money.
The man returned to Belmont with an offer to pay 18 weeks’ rent for the premises.
“He said ‘unky… you turned my life around’,” Eades told HuffPost Australia.
It’s a story Eades tells with pride. This young man was one of the 140 ex-offenders he and his supporters had gotten across the line through training to full-time work in the two years Ngalla Maya operated without significant funding.
Because of these outcomes Ngalla Maya was approved for Federal Government support in the form of a community-led outcomes based grant worth up to $1.7 million.
Since the federal funding came through in April, the program has helped a further 40 people into full-time work.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners accounted for just over a quarter (27 percent) of the total Australian prisoner population and it increased in every jurisdiction except South Australia in 2016, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Forty percent of Western Australia’s prison population is made up of Aboriginal people, despite the fact Indigenous Australians make up just 3 percent of the state’s total population, suicide prevention campaigner Gerry Georgatos said.
Georgatos estimates that by 2025 three-quarters of the state’s prison population will be made up of Aboriginal people. Nationally, that figure will jump to more than one in two by the same year.
It’s one of the reasons why Georgatos is such a big backer of Ngalla Maya.
“Each year more are incarcerated,” he told HuffPost Australia.
“Ngalla Maya works with people who others have given up on.”
‘It’s About The Mentoring’
Eades works with released offenders, both male and female. And while the program is geared towards Indigenous Australians, he has non-Indigenous clients as well in a variety of counselling and practical classes.
“When we say mentoring, we mean our people mentoring our people,” the Noongar man said.
“I tell them, no matter what is going on at home, you have to put that aside cause there’s a bigger picture here.”
And that bigger picture is creating opportunities and options, breaking the cycle of recidivism and finding employment.
“Children will see their mums and dads working and say that’s the norm,” Eades said.
Eades helps non-Indigenous offenders who’ve found themselves in the system. One man who had spent 28 of his 47 years in and out of prison is now being helped by Ngalla Maya.
“We all knew him growing up,” said Eades. “Twenty-eight years inside. He’s 47.
“Our boys spent half their lives in prison. Seventy percent have done 20 years’ jail by time they’re 40.”
‘Coming Out Of Nothing… Creates Helplessness’
Eades devoted himself to mentoring former prisoners into steady employment and steady living after spending almost two decades in and out of jail.
“Coming from a life of incarceration myself, I saw a gap in the community,” Eades said.
“Getting them across the line into employment was something that was very needed for our community. Getting a job, being able to be financially stable.
“I know that coming out to nothing, not being able to support your family, your children and missus, it creates a helplessness.”
Under the community-led grant, the government will pick up the tab for 80 people, while Ngalla Maya will pick up the tab for a further 120.
“We have two-and-a-half years to get 80 people across the line,” said Georgatos.
“Half have to be ex-offenders released within the past 12 months.”
Both Georgatos and Eades have vowed not to earn a cent as a result of the funding, “meaning that we will be able to get around 40 more former inmates into training and full-time employment,” Georgatos said.
“We’re spending everything we’ve got getting people across the line.
“We just can’t turn anyone away.”
We just can’t turn anyone away. This is the only way to make sure broken lives do not become lost lives. Gerry Georgatos
Labor Senator Sue Lines is a supporter of Ngalla Maya and Eades’ work.
“It’s 100 percent the work of Mervyn and his supporters,” she told HuffPost Australia. “He’s a no-nonsense kind of person.”
When Lines first encountered Ngalla Maya they were “getting by on the smell of an oily rag” and good will, she said. She’s since seen the program flourish.
“If it lessens the overall incarceration rate then it’s a success,” she said, adding that “early intervention programs were still needed”.
It’s a program that’s worth the grant, Lines said.
HuffPost Australia contacted Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion for this story.
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