Learn about our sponsors
Who is a sponsor?
Your child’s sponsor/s are an important part of the Learning for Life program. A sponsor is someone who cares about your child’s education and gives money to support them. Their sponsor may be an individual or even a group of people. For example, another family or group of work friends. Your child might even have two sponsors.
We asked three of our Learning for Life sponsors to share a bit about themselves and why they joined the program.
Meet Elaine
Elaine loves having a big family. She has four daughters and 10 grandchildren.
“I seem to accumulate family, which is rather nice,” says Elaine. When her daughters were younger, their friends gravitated towards their home.
For Elaine, being a Learning for Life sponsor is not too different to supporting her extended family.
“I always say I have a lot of extra daughters and grandchildren,” she says. “My daughter’s friends and their children have sort of adopted me.”
Elaine has been a sponsor for more than a decade.
By being a sponsor, she hopes she can help at least one child feel they have a great start in life and to believe in themselves. “That’s the most important thing, to help them believe in themselves and know that somebody believes in them.”
Meet Jeremy
Having arrived in Australia from the Philippines in the early 1990s, Jeremy still thinks about the sacrifices his parents had to make growing up.
It was only much later that he learned of the difficulties they faced.
As well as his career in tech and being a Learning for Life sponsor, Jeremy works at a refugee community centre. He is motivated by the idea of making someone else’s life a little easier. “There is a lot of hurt in this world, and if you have the means and capacity, why not help make it a little less bad?”
Schooling, he found, is key to building a brighter future. “Being able to learn and learning how to acquire knowledge at an efficient rate, is probably the most important thing.”
As a Learning for Life sponsor, Jeremy hopes his donations can help change other young lives. “It feels like this person could potentially do so many things in this world. And I am proud and honoured to be helping them out. I would like them to get what they want. I want them to dream big. That’s all I could wish for them.”
Meet Marianne
Marianne’s life was changed forever when her husband suddenly died of a heart attack in 1984. “My daughters were [aged] four and 18 months at the time,” she remembers.
Until that point, the couple had travelled a lot and had lived overseas for a time. “My eldest daughter was born in Germany, my youngest in Alabama.” Left with two small children when her husband died, Marianne decided to return to Australia.
In the USA, Marianne worked in neonatal intensive care. Since moving back home, she has worked as a psychologist specialising in family therapy.
Being able to provide financial support through Learning for Life is a wonderful thing. It’s so easy to do, and yet it makes such a difference for the child and the parents, knowing they’re part of a community that cares about them.
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