Through the lens of serving the community and learning about local Gold Coast issues, the Gold Coast Junior Council program offers many insightful opportunities for high school students to learn how to create change in our city.
For instance, at our last meeting on Thursday 14 July, we had some local organisations share with us about their part in our city. Some of the groups include, Homelessness Connect, Gold Coast Youth Services, GC Disaster Management, Freddy Match, and the GC Transport program.
By members from these programs discussing their work in our city and the plans for our city’s future, it inspired many students to take action and to take away many ideas to share with their schools.
For us, it was exciting to help run the meeting as part of the executive committee, and we cannot wait for our next meeting which will be celebrating 30 years of the program.
Then, on Tuesday 19 July 2022, we, along with the five other members of the Junior Council Executive Team, had the opportunity to meet with mayor of the Gold Coast, Tom Tate to ask question's of him, and discuss life in the city.
During this meeting, we spoke of the many established and emerging opportunities for work on the Gold Coast, the ways that we can improve the opportunities available to young people from our community in the sciences, and the future of transport in our city, including the now in-progress extension of the tram services.
We were excited to hear about the many exciting developments and opportunities within our city and cannot wait to see them come to fruition, with so many amazing things to come.
This was an incredible and rare opportunity which we are both exceedingly grateful to have had.
Mathilda Bester and Samuel Brown
Year 11 Students