Raise Foundation | Annual Report 2022
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Letter from the Chair and CEO
So many young people across the country needed support to strengthen their hope, resilience, help seeking skills and engagement with school in 2022. They needed a mentor to show up for them. That’s why we’re thrilled we could provide 2,088 young people with a Raise mentor and that over 90% graduated from our mentoring program. This year, we screened and trained 915 new volunteer mentors and retained a record 1,107 experienced mentors. Over the past 14 years we have provided a Raise Mentor to almost 11,000 young Australians and trained over 7,200 volunteer mentors across the country. We are proud of the impact our mentoring program has and our outcomes are detailed beautifully in our enclosed Evaluation Report, which I know you will enjoy reading. But our work was not without obstacles this year. On the ground, there were tough challenges for young people, schools, mentors and our team. The challenges schools are experiencing are unprecedented – staff shortages, oversized classes, student disengagement, behavioural issues and challenges with students’ social and emotional wellbeing. It was particularly tough in New South Wales and Victoria, where our biggest footprint is, due to their extended lockdowns. The transition back to face- to-face learning after two disrupted years was extraordinary. We work with mostly Year 8 students, most of whom have not attended school regularly in-person since they were in Year 5. Two very different developmental stages. For our organisation, sourcing volunteer mentors was and continues to be a challenge. Volunteering Australia reports that volunteering across the country has declined by up to 40% and it is a testament to all in our Raise village that we were able to maintain our mentoring match number above 2,000. Attracting increased funding to propel our growth strategy towards supporting more young people requires continued focus. Typically, we recruit our mentors first, then source the schools and funding required to bring those programs to life. However, in mid-2022, after seeing the urgent need, we decided to focus on offering our program to schools as the priority for 2023.
We received 87 new school applications in addition to our current 180 programs, so our plan to support more young people was in action. However, it became a stark reality in October that we did not have enough funding to meet that demand. For the first time ever, we had to turn schools and young people away. It was a confronting situation for us, and one we hope to never face again. It became obvious that we needed to re-strategise for 2023. We determined that we could raise enough funding to deliver 218 programs for 2,605 young people, rather than the planned 263 programs. However, we will keep stretching towards our goal of offering mentoring programs to all public secondary schools. Ultimately, 2022 was our hardest year yet, but we are inspired by the impact of hope for the future. We are energetically recruiting new mentors, even within the tough volunteering market, to fulfil our 2023 commitment and beyond. So, if you’ve thought about becoming a youth mentor, now is the time, as young people need you more than ever. Our commitment to maximising cost efficiency, particularly as we expect economies of scale as we expand, is something we continue to balance out with the required investment to deliver quality programs as the priority. Since we enacted our Strategic Impact Plan, we have tripled our impact from delivering 66 programs for 726 young people per annum, to delivering 180 programs that supported 2,088 young people in 2022. We are delivering early intervention mentoring programs that provide social and emotional wellbeing support in 21% of secondary schools nationally, compared to 8% in 2017. Our extraordinary staff team and volunteer mentors continue to demonstrate incredible commitment, and their show of heart for our mentees is inspiring to witness. All our supporters give us hope, and they give hope to young Australians. We would like to thank each one of you who continues to support us in so many generous ways. We need and appreciate every donor, every volunteer, every partner. You mean the world to us.
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