HELEN Ritchie doesn’t yet know what she’s in for.
On May 25, the Altona Toll employee will be locked up at the Old Melbourne Gaol for a good cause.
She’s taking part in Whitelion’s Bail Out fund-raising event, which exposes participants or ‘inmates’ to life on the inside.
They will step into the shoes of a young person whose life has been impacted by abuse, neglect, drug addiction and poverty.
Whitelion is a not-for-profit organisation providing mentor and support programs for young people who can’t live at home, helping them find employment and financial stability.
“I’ve always been brought up to try and look after people who are more disadvantaged than us; my parents taught me that,” Ms Ritchie said.
On arrival, she will be stripped of possessions, fingerprinted, photographed and fed prison gruel.
She will then be sentenced to some cell time with her ‘gang’ from Toll, which has about 30 ‘inmates’ from across Melbourne taking part.
They won’t be released until they have each raised $1000 ‘bail’.
Toll at Altona also runs the Second Step program, which provides a career pathway to disadvantaged people and ex-offenders.
The program’s national co-ordinator, Roger Antochi, said more than 250 people had come through the program with a 95percent success rate.
Whitelion CEO Mark Watt said each year in Australia there were more than 46,000 child protection cases, almost 36,000 young people in out-of-home care and 14,500 young people in the court system.
“Families are breaking down, and when they break down they break down significantly,” he said.
“These young people need relationships, they need support and they need things that government would really struggle to provide.
“So it is a partnership between the community and the government to raise these 36,000 children and young people who find themselves not being able to live at home.”
In last year’s national Bail Out, more than 200 ‘inmates’ raised more than $415,000.
For more information and to register, visit whitelionbailout.org.au
