Andrew Penfold threw in his high-flying corporate banking job to set up a charity to give scholarships for the nation's most disadvantaged children. Source: News Corp Australia
As a banker and lawyer Andrew Penfold was making a motza in Hong Kong when he lost 12 mates - his rugby team - in the Bali bombings 11 years ago.
He felt compelled to help and quickly raised $2 million for the families of Australian and Indonesian victims. The experience was more enriching than any $1 million bonus he ever pocketed.
"I thought 'wow, that was amazing. I can use these skills not to help me get rich but to help other people'," Mr Penfold explains today.
So at 38, he quit his job, moved back to Sydney with his wife Michelle and their three children and spent two years working from his dining room developing a charity, living off his savings.
His idea was to give the nation's most disadvantaged children access to the best education possible, believing education is the pathway to a better future. In four years his Australian Indigenous Education Foundation has gone from zero to a $90 million fund.
Kyle Derrick is one of the hundreds of kids to benefit from the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation scholarship program. Source: News Corp Australia
Mr Penfold, 46, has joined up with some of the biggest names in corporate Australia - Commonwealth Bank and Qantas CEOs Ian Narev and Alan Joyce are ambassadors.
When BHP announced it was extending its sponsorship of AIEF by $10 million last week, it brought to $60 million the amount Mr Penfold has raised from the corporate sector. "We have corporate partnerships that are the envy of the charitable world," Mr Penfold said.
The money makes it possible for AIEF to put 400 students a year through top schools, including Knox Grammar, Kincoppal-Rose Bay, Cranbrook and St Vincent's Potts Point.
What makes the achievement more remarkable is that Mr Penfold has done it without a fundraising department.
The 17 people who work for AIEF can focus on mentoring instead of fundraising, helping graduating children develop beyond school into careers and further studies.
"Not having fundraising KPIs (key performance indicators) and targets is our biggest strength. We are focused on education outcomes for the kids. We are a scholarship provider and fundraising is our servant, not our master," Mr Penfold said.
Children on AIEF scholarships are proving it works, with their record of HSC completion at 90 per cent, compared with the indigenous average of 50 per cent completion.
Mr Penfold knows first hand how a good education can transform a person. His father died when he was six and his mother went to work at restaurants in Glebe to support him and his sister.
By the time he was 16, Mr Penfold had attended seven schools and was going off the rails, running with a gang of troublemakers, many of them indigenous teens from public housing in Glebe and Redfern.
"I wasn't very interested in school. I had my mates, I had my gang and we just ran around and had fun. Mum wasn't neglectful, she was working her guts out."
But she knew his marks of around 30 per cent would never set him up for success, so she begged St Joseph's College in Hunters Hill to take him as a boarder. "I hated it. It was like being sent to jail. I had a life of complete freedom and independence and then I was getting into trouble for putting my elbows on the table," Mr Penfold said.
But soon three meals a day, early nights, plenty of sport and supervised homework began to pay off.
"These schools morph into you and you into them," Mr Penfold said. "Everything around you is designed to make you succeed."
He eventually graduated top of the class in maths, history and economics.
Mr Penfold says AIEF has been so successful raising funds in the corporate sector because he speaks the same language as corporate Australia - results and accountability rather than feel-good platitudes.
"With my business background, all I really care about is results," Mr Penfold said. "We don't make a profit, we don't pay dividends, but we run it like a business. People in business relate to that because they understand the language.
"I sit there and go cross-eyed listening to people who have always worked in the charitable sector because I don't know what they are talking about.
"I did this because I believe in it. It's not a job, it's not a career, it's a vocation."
Kyle came from a poor background with few prospects in Dubbo when he won a scholarship to study at St Gregorys College in Campbelltown. Source: News Corp Australia
KYLE'S STORY
KYLE Derrick didn't bother much with going to school - he preferred sleeping in and playing Xbox when he was living at home in Dubbo with his mum.
A few years later and his life is turning around.
At boarding school he's enjoying maths, English and sport, and recently returned from a week-long camping trek through the bush, relying on teamwork, a compass and a backpack of supplies to survive.
Last month he got his first passport to travel overseas, one of the team selected to play in England and France for the NSW 2013 Rugby League Aboriginal Young Achievers Tour.
These are all opportunities that two years ago never seemed possible for this 16-year-old.
Derrick says moving in with his dad in Dubbo was the first step toward ending the aimless drifting and building a future. "He pushed me to play sports, he took me to school every day, and he watched every game of my rugby league," Derrick says.
"He said if you want to make something of your life you need to go to school."
The next step was getting into the right school, and when he first sought a place at St Gregory's College in Campbelltown, he was knocked back because his school attendance and reports were bad. He knuckled down in Year 7 at Endeavour College in Caringbah and he demonstrated he could improve, before being selected for a scholarship with the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation to study at St Greg's.
"I feel safer and better now. I can get a good education and it's better for sport," Derrick says.
The AIEF also supported his camping trek with Outward Bound through the Namadgi National Park outside Canberra. Derrick says it challenged him - abseiling, cooking his own food and setting up a "bivvie", a makeshift shelter of ropes and a tarp. "I've always been a bit of an individual but I'm opening up and starting to talk to people, and I can work in teams," he says. "When I went to camp, I wasn't confident, I was a bit nervous but now I'm feeling good. It was really cold at night and sometimes possums crawled in to my bivvie. When I felt them crawling on my leg, I had to kick them out."
St Greg's head of boarding Matthew Brennan said the benefits of AIEF scholarships go beyond financial support, through to experiences like outward bound and the AIEF mentoring program that helps students set career paths and gives guidance through university. "It's about connections," Mr Brennan says.
source:news
0 comments:
Post a Comment