He has his finger on the pulse when it comes to identifying and addressing those challenges, having worked at Sentral Youth Services for 17 years.

“We call this place the cottage – it is a safe supervised space for young people to access,” he said. 

“They can come down here for something as simple as a nice quiet area to chill out and interact with their friends socially or they can come here for a specific purpose, that may be for a range of our programs.

“I think Kiama has the same issues as anywhere else, employment is quite difficult to source locally and to try and keep young people in the area without them having to venture off for work, we want to try and provide more options for young people, to keep them local, and keep them in the town.”

Sentral Youth Services run a number of varied and diverse programs throughout the year, which include barista training, personal training, yoga and structured programs such as entrepreneurs program and event management.

“There’s quite a lot we do and young people are all invited to come down and learn new skills,” Mr Chatfield said.

“That’s the most important thing about Sentral, we want people to leave here with more skills and more confidence than they had when they first walked in.

“My colleague Dylan, works on a program called ‘Intergen Munch Out’, which is a program about nutrition and food psychology. 

“We want to try and impart knowledge onto young people about how to source healthy, local produce, and what effect food has on their mental, physical and emotional health. We want to make sure young people know what they’re putting in their body and know that good food is good fuel.”

The program also works to engage youth with older people in the community. 

“Dylan has set it up so it is intergenerational – we have young people and we have older people and they cook together, interact socially and share stories,” Mr Chatfield said.

“It’s really important if we are trying to create that cohesion in the community.

“We know whenever there are issues in the community and people always talk about underage drinking, drug use or vandalism, straight away they look at it as just an issue for a youth worker or teacher, as a community we can work together to try to address some of this.”

Sentral Youth Services has recently been rebranded and will relaunch on Saturday, August 5.

“Today I’ve been up to Kiama High School and ran an event management course, we work very closely with them and they’re fantastic supporters of us,” Mr Chatfield said. 

“We ran the event management course and worked with 18 students, they’re amazing students, and they will be responsible for relaunching this centre.

“We know with only one high school in the local government area, that’s where most of our target audience is. We can’t sit down here and expect young people to just come to us, we need to go to them, and we need to take them something substantial, something they can learn from us, then take away and hopefully teach their peers, friends and families.”