(His story told by his colleague James Southan). Toby and I first met one and a half years ago when I found work at the Matthew Talbot hostel in Woolloomooloo. Toby was (and is) the nurse Unit manager there and I was applying for a casual nurse position.

He struck me as a nice enough fellow, enthusiastic and interested in his work with Sydney’s homeless population. We got to know each other over the following months and I found out that he had previously trained as a youth pastor and had practiced this at Parkside Baptist church which delivered services for disadvantaged youth, including the Cabramatta area. He told me that his experiences here (and through working on the street) had sparked a real interest in the promotion of people through their lives and into developing ways in which he could help to rebuild and recover from often difficult situations.

As time went by at the hostel I got to know most of the clients there and got over my initial fear of them and started to understand more of the problems. My focus then was more on getting better results from services such as hospital and mental health teams. When I brought up these problems with Toby I found that he had been inventing some solution to these issues.

We talked through a variety of ideas and worked out their strong and weak points and found that there were two ideas that stuck out.

1. That we should up stumps at the hostel and embark on our own as a fully fledged health care centre for the disadvantaged and homeless which would have a mobile arm that could treat people for free in the community.
2. To start placing mentally ill homeless men in accommodation and to provide them with an appropriate care and support.

In the end (after much deliberation) we decided that mental health housing for these men was our best way to make a lasting and real impact on the lives of this population.

Toby became a new man once things had been decided for the project – often working day and night working over the finer details of what the idea was all about. From his work he decided on what the goals of the idea were, and that is where ROAM started.

ROAM, stands for recovery through ownership and assertive management. Its focus is to provide a service where mentally ill homeless men can be housed and supported long term, whilst also acquiring basic assets and education.

It is also the name of a not-for-profit service provider, with which Toby was the sole driving force to set up. He assembled a committee, contacted government departments, accountants…

We then both searched for some clients to start placing and before we new it there were two clients placed in some very nice accommodation in the city. A small, though rewarding, beginning which saw two mentally ill homeless men’s lives transformed.

Since its beginning Toby has pushed to staff the service through with absolutely no money apart from some donations (mainly from Toby) this is a hard thing to do.

More recently there have been some talks with another NGO in the area, namely Oasis (a youth service provided by the Salvation Army in Surry Hills). Toby has successfully approached them with an idea which will see ROAM housing 18 mentally ill youth in co-operation with the Salvation Army.

With Oasis housing just 20 clients you can see that this project is mammoth. The Salvation Army has promised to dedicate some of the their workers time to the project though extra staff will need to be hired. Toby is even putting himself on the line here by living on the premises as a care-taker for the building, all the while still working at the Talbot hostel. That is the level of dedication he has to the project.