Three rooms. Three builders. Ten minutes per room. Brisbane young people carry the first build story. David from Diagrama helps hold the therapeutic alternative. Adelaide organisations open the tour by showing their programs, costs, evidence, and support needs.
The shape
The container is not a museum. Each room is built before each city, with the people from that city. The first room remembers detention. The second room shows the alternative. The third room hands the conversation to the community already doing the work. In Adelaide, that means local organisations talking about their programs during the Adelaide activation week.
The first room is a detention cell, carried first by Brisbane young people who supported the build. At each tour stop, local young people with lived experience and the local youth support organisation decide what it should look like, what it should feel like, and what the public needs to sit with.
The second room holds the alternative. David from Diagrama helps anchor the practice lens from Spain's Diagrama Foundation: therapeutic centres, family contact, education at the centre, and staff relationships that replace control with care. The base room stays consistent. Local context can be layered in.
The third room is built by local organisations already running youth-justice work in that city. Mount Druitt gives the process a small first gathering; at the Adelaide activation, South Australian organisations use the room to explain their programs, what they cost, and what support would let them keep young people connected.
Inside
You take your shoes off. You wear what is given. You walk in. The door locks behind you. A journal sits on the bed in Room 1. There is no signage. There is no soundtrack. Whatever happens, happens.
The young person who walks you through is paid for it. They were locked up. They built this room. They tell you what they did when the door locked on them. They walk you out.
Modelled on Vision Australia's precedent: pay the people who lived it to lead the experience. The expertise is the wage.
30 minutes total · 10 in each room
Doors lock behind you. One person at a time.
Only a journal inside. No screens, no signage. Write or don't.
Led through by a young person paid as a facilitator. They tell you what they did when the door locked on them.
Who walks through
Every cohort gets a different way in, a different code, a different brief, a different conversation on the way out. Same container. Same young people leading. Different stakes.
BRING: Free entry. School-group access. Yarning circles after.
LEAVE WITH: A new frame for the conversation that is already happening at home.
BRING: Course-aligned brief. Reflective journal task. Optional research consent.
LEAVE WITH: Embodied evidence for criminology, social work, law, and design subjects.
BRING: Walk the cell. Then sit down with the local org behind Room 3.
LEAVE WITH: Connection to a working alternative that is already running on their patch.
BRING: Full walk-through. Then a private conversation with the host org about what would change.
LEAVE WITH: A direct ask, on the record, with the people closest to it.
BRING: Full walk-through. Hosted reflection back at chambers.
LEAVE WITH: A line they can hold inside sentencing remarks, made by walking the line themselves.
BRING: Full walk-through.
LEAVE WITH: Room 3, in particular. The model that puts officers downstream of community, not upstream.
BRING: Walk-through. Interviews with the young people who built the rooms.
LEAVE WITH: A story that is not the press release. The container is the story.
BRING: Last Thursday of every stop. Thirty funders, thirty community leaders, thirty MPs walk through together.
LEAVE WITH: A funding decision made in the same room as the people the funding lands on.
BRING: Six weeks paid as builders, fabricators, storytellers. Trades, art, trauma-informed practice.
LEAVE WITH: A pathway. Pay. A bound copy of their work in a national exhibition.
What comes out
Every walk-through produces something. Every build week produces somebody paid. Every stop hands a permanent artefact back to the host community. Nothing is single-use.
Press, op-eds, broadcast, social. The container becomes a presence, not a press release.
Each Room 3 enters a national travelling exhibition at the end of the year. Books, prints, audio.
Anchor orgs in different cities meet through the container. Practice exchange, not just panels.
Submissions made by walking the room. Civic intelligence linked to live parliamentary inquiries.
Build week training rolls into trades pathways, art residencies, paid work for young people.
Reflection journals, stop case studies, civic intelligence chunks fed back into JusticeHub.
The economic engine
Four young people per stop, paid $1,500 per week × six weeks. The first build story is carried by Brisbane young people who supported the container. At each stop, local young people learn trades, art, and trauma-informed storytelling. They build Room 1. They build Room 3 with the host org. They lead the walk-through. They take the journal home.
Art is not decoration. Art is the curatorial spine. Every program has a pillar of art, film, play, painting, immersive room, exhibition, because art is what carries the work into rooms a report cannot reach.
The container does not arrive with answers. The container creates the room for the answers that are already in the community. Then it leaves the answers behind.
Backbone (travelling team, editorial, coordination, year-end book): $120K across 12 months. Full national tour: $500K.
What you can do today