TRACQS drives change for participants to break through employment travel barriers

To gain employment you need some fundamentals.

Some of those fundamentals may include a specific skillset, perhaps a qualification or even a certain presentation. While all these things are essential, what you need more than anything to do a job, is a way to get there.

Our main objective at TRACQS is to observe the obstacles our participants are facing and find ways to overcome them so that they can find meaningful employment.

One barrier that rings true for many of our participants is that they don’t have their drivers’ licence, and without transport to work– things get complicated.

Through our services for the Community Development Program (CDP), we’ve continued to address licencing barriers for our participants, including the rollout of our TRACQS Driver Licencing Activity, which assists our participants in getting on the roads.

To achieve this, we’ve teamed up with the Indigenous Driver Licencing Unit, which aims to reduce unlicensed driving in remote Indigenous communities. The benefits of a program such as this one, is that it helps to reduce incarcerations rates for licensing offences, reduces road trauma, and most relevantly to us, improves access to employment, education, health and social and cultural activities.

Wanting to ensure we’re able to best support our participants, we collaborated with our participants and community to listen to what they needed.  From there, we learnt that not only was there a greater need to assist with payments for licencing, but also the 100 required hours of lessons, as many participants didn’t have access to a teacher or a vehicle.

Doing what we do best, we took the opportunity to respond by purchasing a duel drive vehicle and hiring TRACQS Driving Activity Supervisor Brandon, who provides driving lessons to our participants as part of their CDP WFD Activity hours and mutual obligation requirements.

With the assistance of the Indigenous Driver Licencing Unit, alongside our initiative, we’ve created many exciting outcomes for our participants, who are now able to get behind the wheel and drive wherever their new employment journey takes them.

So far, we’ve had nothing but positive responses since the beginning of our new activity group in November. With those in the activity describing their experience as ‘excellent’, ‘deadly’ and ‘cool’, we’re seeing nothing but green lights ahead for our eager TRACQS participants.