This April, for Youth Homelessness Matters Day, we put a number most Australians never see onto the walls of Sydney and Melbourne. 28,948. That is how many children in Australia are growing up without a stable home.
We did it with a campaign called No Place To Grow, created pro bono with our friends at Droga5, part of Accenture Song. The idea was simple. We took the children’s height chart, that small ritual that lives on the wall of so many family homes, and we drew it where it should never be: on the street.
A hidden crisis, made impossible to ignore
Child homelessness in Australia is mostly hidden. Of the 28,948 children without a stable home, only a small share are sleeping rough. The rest are in cars, in tents, couch surfing, or in out-of-home care, out of sight and easy to miss.
That is exactly what makes it so hard to solve. You cannot rally a country around a problem it never sees. So we made it visible, one height mark at a time.
A height chart in the wrong place
Each chart carried the average heights of Australian kids aged four to twelve, under one blunt line: no child should grow up on the streets. Behind every mark is a real child at a real age, four, seven, ten, twelve, who deserves a safe place to call home.
A QR code at the base of each chart took passers-by straight to a place they could help. A familiar symbol of growing up, moved a few metres onto a public wall, and suddenly it stops you in your tracks.
Here is how our founder, Noah Yang, put it:
“We wanted people to feel the scale of this, not just read about it.”
A height chart belongs on a wall at home. Seeing one on a street is meant to make you remember that every child deserves one too.
Made possible by people who believe
No Place To Grow was a true team effort, and we are grateful for every hand that shaped it. The idea was born at Droga5 London and brought to life across Droga5 and Accenture Song offices in Australia, London, Dublin and New York.
It took artists to make it real on the wall. Thank you to photographer Simon Harsent, videographer Nelson Bours, muralist Shaun Devenney and the team at Apparition Media. None of them had to give their time and their craft to this. They did it because they believe no child should grow up without a home, and it shows.
The world looked, and so did Australia
The campaign travelled. It was picked up by the creative and advertising press here in Australia and right around the world, from Sydney to London to New York. That reach matters, because attention is the first step. The next is action, and for us it is already underway.
Alongside every adult we support across our programs, we have backed more than 1,000 dependent children, putting help straight into the hands of families at the exact moment they need it most. The kids on those height charts are not an abstract problem. They are exactly who this work is for.
This is just the beginning
A campaign can make a hidden problem visible. What happens next is up to all of us. At We Are Mobilise, we steadfastly believe homelessness is solvable in Australia, including for the 28,948 kids these height charts were drawn for.
If No Place To Grow stopped you in your tracks, you can keep it going. Donate to put support directly into the hands of children and families doing it tough, or get in touch about partnering with us. Every child deserves a safe place to call home, and together we can prove it.
