Tiny Toones shows how to turn endangered young lives upside down

Tiny Toones dancer 13-year-old Vy practising flips at Hun Sen Park, Phnom Penh. Photo: Stuart Isett

Tuy Sobil. Photo: Romi Grossberg

January 2, 201
Carolyn Webb
The Sydney Morning Herald

MELBOURNE social worker Romi Grossberg is dreading the day in March when her two-year post volunteering with Cambodian street kids ends.

''Every day, something here makes me smile,'' she says of her management adviser role at Tiny Toones, a youth drop-in centre in inner Phnom Penh.

''I love my job here so much. I can't ever imagine doing anything else.''

Tiny Toones teaches dance, music, English, Khmer and computer skills, as well as hygiene and HIV, drug and sex education.

Up to 500 people a month aged from four to 25 attend Tiny Toones; a further 600 access outreach visits to slums. They come from extreme poverty, drug abuse and family violence but here they can laugh and achieve.

Ms Grossberg will bring 12 Tiny Toones participants, aged 17 to 25, to perform in her home town next week. She helped raise $30,000 for the trip, and hopes it will raise more funds.

At seven concerts, performers will tell their stories in dance, rap, Khmer music and acting.

The performers include ''Slick'', who from age 13 lived on the streets selling rubbish, fighting and smoking ice. He started learning breakdancing at Tiny Toones in 2007 and, says Ms Grossberg, is, at 19, ''known for his head-spins and incredible body strength and flexibility''.

''Slick'' is clean of drugs, top of English class and has run anti-drug dance workshops in Mexico and Thailand.

The story of Tiny Toones founder and executive director, Tuy Sobil, or KK, is even more extraordinary.

As a child in Long Beach, California, KK was a well known breakdancer but at 13, he joined the Los Angeles gang the Crips, smoked crack and spent his late teens and early 20s in and out of prison. In 2004, after three years in immigration detention, he was deported to his parents' homeland of Cambodia, despite not having been there - he had been born in a Thai refugee camp.

In Phnom Penh, KK worked as a volunteer drug outreach worker and street kids begged him to teach them breakdancing, so he started at his house. A charity, Bridges Across Borders Southeast Asia, funded a drop-in centre and now there are 30 staff, many of them former students.

Before Cambodia, Ms Grossberg had seen disadvantage and addiction as a social worker in St Kilda; Cambodia was something else. To put the poverty in perspective, one $25 ticket to the Melbourne concerts would feed a child for a month. ''There's no social service here, no Centrelink benefits.''

Having a place for youth support, education and self-expression is precious. ''Every single one of them says Tiny Toones has completely changed their lives. A lot of them say they would be dead if they hadn't found Tiny Toones.''

Tiny Toones, January 10-14 at Chapel Off Chapel, Prahran. There is a $100 a head fund-raising dinner on January 15 at Bopha Devi restaurant, Docklands. tinytoones.org