Raise Foundation | Evaluation Report 2024
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A note from our Data and Youth Insights Team
Community is the antidote to loneliness—and it starts with one conversation. It can be hard being a young person in 2024. For the first time in recent history young people are the most likely group to experience loneliness and isolation. More than 3 in 5 of the mentees in Raise school
Raise, to mentor other young people and to pay forward the difference that mentoring made to them. Year after year, thousands of people from all walks of life volunteer to mentor a young person in need in one of our 10 or 20-week in-school programs. They are motivated by a range of factors including giving back to their community, developing their own skills to work or to parent, getting to know new people – but almost universally they end the mentoring year with a greater empathy for young people, a greater understanding of the issues facing young people and a greater appreciation for what it is like to be a young person right now. This year Raise reached 2,546 young people through our in-school programs. Of those, 96% identified at least one positive impact of mentoring from improved confidence and the ability to make friends, to better mental health and feeling less lonely, and being more likely to help others. Across our four key outcomes of Help Seeking, Hope for the Future, Resilience and School Engagement we achieved statistically significant growth in all four outcomes for our 20- week program and three of the four for our 10-week programs. Four out of five parents and carers saw this impact independently - in their child’s wellbeing and in the relationship they had with their child.
programs this year cited loneliness as an issue they had personally faced. Young people are less likely to have a strong social network, less likely to seek help when they need it and less likely to feel optimistic about their future. Young people are worried about what’s happening in their communities, what is happening at school and what is happening in the wider world – as well as the existential threat of climate change and natural disasters. As adults reading about the mental health crisis, school refusal, violence and disconnection, it can feel hard to work out how to help, when the challenges feel systemic and too large for any one person to ameliorate. When Raise started back in 2008, we set out to support just one young person, taking local action in one local community. Sixteen years later we have supported more than 16,000 young people and trained more than 10,000 volunteer mentors to be changemakers in our schools and changemakers in their communities. Young people who came through our programs in early high school are coming back as adults to rejoin
“I hope you keep doing this, so you can help somebody the way you have helped me.” - Raise Mentee
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