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Growing up, Billy Garvey was what you might have called a bad kid.

But that would be careless, because if you paid attention, you would see what he really was,

was a struggling kid.

My story is essentially that I was brought up by a single mum

in one of Australia's most disadvantaged communities.

That would be Frankston in Melbourne's southeast.

She worked three jobs as a waitress.

She had her own mental health struggles.

She found it really hard with

three boys. So we'd often have the power cut off or not have food in the house and things

like that. But she just worked a lot to try and make up for that. Against that backdrop, Billy

says he was a pretty angry teenager. He was angry at the world. And I was kind of frequently told that I would never amount to anything. I clashed with

educators a lot. I clashed with authority. So I was doing a lot of risk-taking behavior that

culminated in my school saying you're out of here. And then none of the schools actually in

the area would take me because of my reputation.

So, yeah, like I said, what some people might call a bad kid.

But at a certain point, things change for Billy.

He started working with kids at an after-school care program, the same one he used to attend,

which funny enough he hated back in the day.

But that job let him down a path nobody expected.

And I worked there for six years and I saw like some of the most difficult or disadvantaged children,

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