Raise Foundation | Annual Report 2022
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Fostering connection Many of us are missing strong connections in our lives right now. While we might embrace the benefits of working from home or readily enjoy the convenience of our hand-held devices, it inevitably means we interact less and spend more time alone. It’s rare to see bus passengers engaging or smiling at each other – let alone looking up. Connection is the heartbeat of thriving communities. It’s the glue that binds families, the laughter between friends, the joy of children playing. Schools and universities thrive on lively group discussions to learn, while workplaces flourish when individuals collaborate. Senior citizens cherish visitors for sharing old memories and creating new ones. Positive community connections are vital – that’s why young people need mentors. Increasing loneliness and isolation are linked to the rising rates of mental health issues, homelessness, bullying, discrimination, and psychosocial issues in our society. To combat this, in 2023, Raise fostered more thriving communities than ever before. It was a record-breaking year for reach across the organisation. We built connections by training over 1,600 adult volunteers together in groups; engaged more than 2,700 struggling young people in our programs; matched mentees and mentors in 210 schools; and gathered our team of over 100 staff together for a conference. We empowered connection in everything we did in 2023. Letter from the Chair and CEO
Inspiring confidence We do one thing, youth mentoring, and we do it really well. Our mentoring creates eye-to-eye connection through heart-to-heart conversation, and we have proven the difference it makes for the past 15 years. In 2023, our program achieved a statistically significant impact for mentees in all four key outcome areas – help seeking skills, resilience, school belonging and hope for the future. Our confidence comes from our consistent work to strategically improve our programs using strong analysis of quality data. Alongside our own data, we look forward to releasing the results of our independent outcome, process, and economic evaluation very soon. Early indicators demonstrate strong impact and learnings. Most importantly, the young people in our programs are building confidence. We see increases in their ability to build relationships; to identify trusted adults and ask them for help; to set goals and celebrate when they achieve them; to come to school when they don’t feel like it. All these milestones build a strong, lifelong foundation of confidence. We want to sincerely thank our funding partners for being confident in us and the work we do. Their support gives us the confidence to reach higher and to keep growing, resulting in us tripling our impact over the past six years.
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