Finding your way home

Sometimes you have to leave home to find it again. That’s exactly what Emily discovered when she moved from Sydney to Narromine and joined NASCA.

Emily was just 13 years old when she left everything she had ever known behind. 

Having spent her whole life in Sydney, she decided to pack up and move to Narromine – a small town in Northwest NSW – to start a new life.

“I moved out because we were having family problems at home,” says Emily. 

“Leaving my Mum was a big thing, but I needed to grow on my own.”

Emily moved in with extended family and enrolled at Narromine High School. Those early months were hard, being so far away from home, those she loved, and suffering from anxiety, she found herself struggling.

“I felt alone here with no one to help me. I felt disconnected from the teachers, and I had this guard up and didn’t want to be vulnerable,” says Emily.

Emily’s attendance was so low she was at risk of being kicked out of school. But all that changed when she joined NASCA. 

“Before NASCA, Em was really on the outer, she was on the back-foot. We had a lot of hard chats with her regarding her attendance, but we just remained consistent with her, and the more we did that, the more she realised we weren’t going anywhere and that we were going to be there for her no matter what,” says NASCA Program Lead Ashley Bayliss. 

“Dealing with my family problems made me feel like no one was ever permanent, no one was going to stick around but that’s different with NASCA and with Ash. They would sit with me and have deep conversations about why I didn’t want to come to school. I bottle a lot of things up so it took a big weight off my shoulders. I trust Ash so it made me feel more comfortable coming to school knowing I had NASCA and Ash supporting me,” says Emily. 

It wasn’t just the chats and one-to-one mentoring that helped Emily turn things around, NASCA made sure they supported her every step of the way. From taking her to and from school on the NASCA bus, to accompanying her to class, helping her with her studies and making sure she kept coming back, day in and day out. 

“I went from having thirty percent attendance to over eighty percent. I wouldn’t have been able to do that without the support I got from Ash and NASCA,” says Emily.

Today, Emily is thriving. She has just been named School Captain and is undertaking a traineeship in Allied Health so she can one day become a physiotherapist. 

But more important than that, Emily has found herself.