For many people the image of a homeless person is likely to be of an old man carrying his worldly goods in a plastic bag and sleeping on the streets.
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But it's actually far more likely that the homeless person will be under the age of 30. According to Southern Youth and Family Services (SYFS), nearly half of Australia's homeless population is under 25 years of age.
The Illawarra-based service said that, on any given night, 26,000 young people in Australia are homeless. According to the 2011 census, 1203 young people in the Illawarra and Shoalhaven were homeless on census night.
To highlight their plight yesterday - which was Youth Homelessness Matters Day - and show what they can contribute to society, SYFS organised a panel of seven young people who had all experienced homelessness.
One of the panellists was Barbara, 24, who is a former client of Illawarra Youth Housing (IYH). She now rents privately in Barrack Heights and has been for the last two years but before then spent two years living in their accommodation.
"I was in and out of home since I was 16," Barbara said.
"It didn't become urgent until I was 19 and had had my first child and was pregnant with my second. I was living at a friend's house and causing their accommodation to be overcrowded."
When she started looking for help, Barbara also felt homelessness was an older person's problem. Until a youth worker at her high school told her about IYH, she had no idea such places existed.
Barbara said the service put a roof over her head, which allowed her to start to shape her future.
"They gave me the firm foundation that I needed to put my feet back on the ground," she said.
"I needed somewhere to call home and build up to the next step."
That next step was education - Barbara has since graduated with a Disability Certificate 3 and now works full-time in the field of disability services.
Another panellist was 18-year-old Robyn, who spent a few nights homeless after her family split up and there were issues where the children would live.
She was sent up to crisis accommodation in Minto, where she lived for a month before returning to the Illawarra and SYFS.
"If I didn't have the support that I've been getting right now, I would have dropped out in Year 10, which is where I was at the time," Robyn said.
Instead, she went on and is now studying youth work at TAFE, a decision inspired by seeing what the youth workers had done to help her.
