Raise Foundation’s mission is to deliver best practice mentoring programs to young people in public high schools across Australia. In doing so Raise Foundation is pursuing its vision to create thriving communities across generations by training volunteer mentors from local communities to empower these young people to become more resilient, capable and connected.
It is a confronting fact that 1 in 4 young Australians say they are unhappy with their lives, 1 in 4 have a mental health condition and 1 in 10 are completely disengaged from education, employment and training. This disengagement from economic participation and the associated costs of poor mental health and social isolation for our youth equates to estimated lost earnings of up to $11.3 billion GDP.
This is an urgent social problem that needs a proven, scalable solution like best practice youth mentoring which Raise Foundation has been delivering since 2008.
Youth mentoring provides:
- direct help to develop a young person’s skills for re-engagement in education or employment; and
- an indirect, holistic pathway to build a young person’s resilience, connection and wellbeing strategies to help them resolve their personal barriers to engagement.
For ten years Raise Foundation has been attracting and recruiting volunteers from local communities and bringing them into public secondary schools to connect one-on-one with young people in need – giving them the opportunity to experience, often for the first time, a confiding and supportive relationship with an adult – one of the single best predictors of psychological health and vitality amongst young people.
To date, almost 4,500 young Australians have graduated from Raise programs with evidenced-based, statistically significant improvements in their resilience, relationships, confidence, coping strategies, ability to set and achieve goals, engagement with education and employment, and their ability to ask trusted adults for help. In achieving this Raise Foundation has trained more than 3,200 community-minded volunteers to be professional youth mentors.
How Third Link is helping
Raise Foundation uses funding from ThirdLink to continue operating these successful programs. Excitingly, ThirdLink also provided seed funding for a collaboration between Raise Foundation and industry experts at the start of 2018 to develop a robust strategy to dramatically scale-up the availability of its youth mentoring programs into every public high school in Australia. Subsequent project funding from ThirdLink is enabling Raise Foundation to properly resource the strategy implementation whilst maintaining the delivery of its existing best practice mentoring programs year-on-year.