Ari Travis ran away from home at 14 and spent a couple of years living on the streets. He remembers inhaling deodorant fumes, stealing booze from stores and getting in trouble with police. More than once, he tried to kill himself, once by lying on a railway track where a train rumbled above him with inches to spare.
A youth worker told him about Everything Suarve (ESuarve), an Australian nonprofit that trains at-risk youth in practical and mental health skills. He signed up. Today, Travis has a job in the psych ward of a hospital and just moved into his own rented home.
“ESuarve changed my life around,” says Travis, who celebrated his 19th birthday this past April. “Straight away it felt like family. It was something I never had before.”
With a mix of construction skills training and tough love, ESuarve, located near the city of Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, has helped some 350 young people since it opened in 2020. Mostly male, with an average age of 17, they are referred by police, by social workers – and by each other.
As the number of clients grows, ESuarve is turning to Microsoft technology to handle its mounting pile of administrative work – everything from managing referrals to tracking progress and securing funding.
Taking a deep breath
ESuarve was started by Joseph Te Puni-Fromont six years ago to help the kind of young man he once was.
Te Puni-Fromont grew up in social housing in New Zealand and while it was a loving household, there were gangs, drugs and alcohol at his doorstep. He lost his first friend in a drunk-driving incident at 14, was expelled from school at 15 and was caught dealing drugs at 16 by his police officer father. “I was a troubled teen and felt like I was misunderstood,” he says.
When he was 19, he moved to Australia to play rugby, working in construction to pay the bills. There were drugs and alcohol, he says, adding: “I wasn’t happy.” In his late 20s, a men’s retreat changed his outlook on life.
“I was finally given the tools to deal with my feelings,” he says. “I knew straight away I wanted to help people.”
He named his nonprofit Everything Suarve or ESuarve. “Suave” because he was looking to instill confidence, but with an “r” thrown in just to be different.
The nonprofit now runs three retreats a year at its facility in Pimpama, a northern suburb of Gold Coast. About 20 participants spend 10 weeks together figuring out how to get their lives – and their heads – in order.
Many are repeat offenders. “You name it, they’ve done it – grievous bodily harm, stolen cars, breaking and entering, drugs and alcohol,” says Te Puni-Fromont. “We’ve literally had parents drop kids off and say, ‘Good luck with them.’ This fires our team up more.”
Participants learn to build tiny houses, leading to a nationally recognized certificate in construction. They also learn to budget, cook, interview for jobs and show up on time. “It’s purely to get them into structure, routine and habit,” he says.
“If it’s a young person that’s been yelled at their whole life, yelling at them is not going to help,” he says. The goal is to show them their actions have consequences: “If you’re late, maybe the whole team is punished.”
They also learn to handle emotions. There are ice baths, saunas, deep breathing and something called “primal screaming,” where they scream out their frustrations in the bush. There’s a feeling of family: Participants call the trainers “Uncle” and “Aunt.”
Ninety percent of those who sign up finish the 10-week course and graduate with a construction certificate, says Camille Pepper, ESuarve’s CEO. Many go on to a job in Queensland’s labor-strapped construction industry. Others go on to work in IT, hospitality or retail. The recidivism rate is 10 percent.
ESuarve’s work has attracted attention nationally. Last year, the Australian government awarded it a National Gold Award at the Australian Crime and Violence Prevention Awards.
Growing with the help of technology
The nonprofit started with an initial donation of 25,000 Australian dollars (US$18,000) from Pepper and her husband, who own a property investment company. In the six years since, annual expenditure has grown to $1 million Australian dollars (US$717,000), paid for with a mix of government grants and corporate donations.
Yet the team has stayed small at between three and seven people, depending on the time of year.
As the program has grown, so too has its administrative burden. Up until about a year ago, a lot of the admin work was manual. ESuarve had a form on its website where people could sign up, but following up for details was done on the phone and through emails. The team kept paper files.
In late 2024, ONGC, a technology services company, was brought in to figure out how to document and automate ESuarve’s workflows using Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Power Automate.
The new system captures not just the sign-up form on the website but all subsequent communications, allowing staff to review and approve everything in the same place.
It even sends an email upon sign-up to the Australian Trade College, the organization that bestows the construction certificate. Once a participant starts a course, the system tracks in one centralized place progress, attendance records, any untoward incidents and whether a participant lands a job after graduating.
For a nonprofit that relies heavily on government grants, this also makes it easier for Pepper to pull data to meet government reporting requirements and to show impact for grant applications.
Data protection was a big factor in selecting Microsoft’s technology for ESuarve.
“We work with highly vulnerable young people, so the information we manage is extremely sensitive and must be protected in line with Australian Child Protection and Privacy laws,” says Pepper. “Beyond compliance, safeguarding this data is essential to maintaining trust and creating a safe environment where young people feel secure to engage.”
The ESuarve team also began using Microsoft Copilot, an AI assistant, to do things like summarize government documents to figure out what grants they’re eligible for.
“For Joe and Camille, they are so time poor. Joe is in meetings constantly,” says Deniz Uysal, a solutions architect at ONGC Systems. “Copilot can immediately summarize meetings. That was probably their A-ha moment with Copilot.”
Te Puni-Fromont, who used to struggle with reading and writing and left school at 15, says he also uses Copilot to polish emails. He writes them, including personal touches, then uses Copilot to edit them for grammar and spelling.
The end result, says Te Puni-Fromont, is “we have more time to go put back into the young people.”
‘There’s a kitchen!’
One of those young people is Travis.
On a recent morning, he stopped by ESuarve before work, to take an ice bath and sauna and do some breath work.
After graduating from ESuarve, Travis was a youth worker for a while before becoming a peer worker in the psychiatric ward at Logan Hospital in Logan, just south of Brisbane. He brings his ukelele to work, to play for patients and “bring joy.”
He recently moved into his own home – “There’s a kitchen! There’s an oven! There’s a bathroom with a shower!” –which he shares with friends. He was also recently selected as a member of the Queensland Youth Parliament, where he plans to work on a bill to ensure a roof over the head of everyone under 18.
“I didn’t have a voice growing up,” he says. “ESuarve helped me have a voice.”
Top photo: Participants of ESuarve’s training program for at-risk youth learn construction skills and life lessons. (Photos courtesy of ESuarve)
Chen May Yee writes about AI and innovation for Microsoft. Previously, she was a staff correspondent for Agence France-Presse and the Wall Street Journal and an editor at the Singapore Straits Times and the Minnesota Star Tribune, covering topics from business to health to technology. You can contact May Yee on LinkedIn.