Youth Research Council

Grace lives in Tasmania and grew up in an outer regional area before moving into the city. She has worked in the hospitality industry for several years. Complementary to this, in 2018 Grace completed her Certificate III and IV in Business and is now undertaking a Diploma of Leadership and Management. She hopes that following her current studies she will be able to continue her career path into politics and policy.

Finding solutions to help close the gap of the missing middle of youth mental health services is something Grace strongly supports. She is also interested in outlooks, quality of life and implications of those who have previously experienced mental ill-health. In her role with the Youth Research Council (YRC) she hopes to encourage a holistic approach to youth mental health and is humbled to have the opportunity to represent young people with lived experience of mental ill-health on a national level.

In her spare time, she advocates for youth homelessness and housing and hopes that her lived experience can be utilised to better shape the experiences of other young people. As a member of Greater Hobart Homelessness Alliance and the 2020 lived experience co-chair of Housing with Dignity Reference Group at the Hobart City Council she hopes to help pave the way for greater levels of lived experience consultancy in Tasmania. Having worked with local and international reaching media on a variety of platforms including print media, televised news, social media, film, podcast and radio, her aim is to promote a strong message that there is no one face of homelessness. She is a published author in the YNOT Annual Report 2017-2018 and Parity Magazine, Responding to Homelessness in Tasmania, Volume 32 - Issue 9. She has also contributed to a submission representing young Tasmanians for the National Parliamentary Inquiry into Homelessness in 2020. 

Grace acknowledges that youth homelessness and housing often presents in conjunction with issues relating to youth mental health and feels that these issues must be tackled together with neither being considered less important than the other. Eager to expand her field of knowledge Grace is looking forward to the valuable experiences to come whilst working with the YRC.