CEO Autumn Message

Life is difficult for many people right now and children in Australia, indeed around the world, are beginning to experience mass disruption to their education, with the potential of more to come.  However, life for many of the children and young people that Ardoch support has always been difficult, and their education disrupted long before now.

Our work has never been more important for the one in three Australian children in Australia’s most disadvantaged communities who start school developmentally vulnerable and continue to fall behind as they continue to progress through school.  Our community’s shared health crisis risks seeing these children fall further and further behind as they and their families lack some of the most basic infrastructure needed to support systems of remote and online learning, or access to positive role models and real life learning experiences that Ardoch’s programs make possible for them to enjoy and learn from.

As opportunities within schools, and external excursions have been suspended, and many of our key corporate workplace partners now have their employees dispersed in remote work from home locations, our challenge over the ensuing months is to explore how to adapt delivery of our programs that rely on physical proximity or develop new ones so that we continue to create impact while in these constrained circumstances.

We will be working with our partner early years services and primary and secondary schools to explore new ways to deliver programs for children in disadvantaged communities that increase engagement, build aspiration and enhance their learning outcomes.  Our connections with you, our supporters, are essential to this as Ardoch’s core value of collaboration tells us ‘we can’t do this alone.

Thank you for the connections you helped us make in 2019 and your generous contribution to the results we achieved.  We hope you are as proud as we are of the impact that you’ve had on the lives of children in some of Australia’s most disadvantaged communities.

Kylee Bates
Chief Executive Officer