I have noticed that kids from certain schools are becoming more involved in social justice works (voluntary) both through school and continuing after they leave. This has involved travels to Aboriginal communities (Bowraville, Moree, Wilcannia etc), Africa, Asia & South American continents and working with the locals on a small but essential project or directing their career towards solving major medical issues in their graduate and post-graduate studies. Is there a growing trend across all school systems to make kids increasingly aware of the plight of others or only a value shared by the private/independent schools? Should these values be espoused across all schools or taught in the home? Does it affect your investment decisions? Eg NRAS or do you handle your contribution in other ways?
A few months ago my wife and I attended an aboriginal awareness seminar which was fantastic and real eye opening, making us leave with a greater level of understanding, compassion and awareness of their history and current issues they face and we can now educate others perhaps to certain points when conversation arises. We also have our few charities we generously donate to which are very important to us. With regards to our investment decisions, absolutely nothing else influences them besides risk/profit. That's it.
The school I worked at did an annual trip to Cambodia where they had adopted an orphanage/school. Students did fund raising during the year to amass funds to finance the school for the next year, and while on the visit completed improvement projects. Many schools do similar projects. Friend's granddaughter is going to Nepal next December with her school. Marg
I've found it to be common amongst Christian based schools but wouldn't be surprised if it's very wide spread. Projects at our school - sister school in Indonesia that fundraising goes to - physical visits to sister school to help during school holidays - christmas fundraising for Perth homeless - year 6s learn to knit and create blankets for Winter blanket homeless appeals - there is 4 or 5 fundraising events/free dress days etc with funds going to Canteen, World Vision In my own little world I support Kiva which is an international micro lender and is fascinating to me. Team Somersoft is going strong and welcome to new members.
In year 11 and 12 when i was a young chap we had to do x amount of hours community service as part of the curriculum. I started donating blood as i think it was best bang for buck to build up the hours with doing the least time on the job Other outings were food trucks handing out food for homeless or other vinnies outings. Some arranged by the school or some you could find yourself. I think it's a good idea to get the kids involved directly rather than just hearing the threats from mum and dad "there are kids in Africa who don't have caviar for breakfast! " But you also need to be careful with the overseas ones and other organisations and how legit they are unfortunately. On 60 min recently was a story on the orphanages in Asia and how they were set up to get foreign whales over to donate money but weren't a real orphanage and were using poor desperate children to raise money for con artists. I think it's good to help in your own backyard first to see first hand what's really going on in the neighbourhood. To many issues overseas are from much higher up levels of policies and corruption.
I like this one too! 'I think it's good to help in your own backyard first to see first hand what's really going on in the neighbourhood. ' Wasn't here something in the bible about doing generosity secretly anonymously? I really like to do that one as well! I hope this helps
There was nothing like that when I went to school & our kids schools didn't do anything that I remember, but on a personal level, we both do volunteer work at the local Salvo's one day a week and support Kiva.
I think with the current generations growing up where the Internet is in their pocket there's a whole lot more information out there about everything, no, that’s not quite right, maybe the information was always there but now anyone can access it relatively easily. If someone told me a “fact” as a kid that was so unfathomable, like some of the mind boggling statistics on how many people die of x, or suffer from y or that we kill z amount of this for n amount of that it got dismissed as the figure are so huge that you can’t wrap your head around it. Nowadays, the younger generation can flip out their phone and do a 2 minute Google fact find. Pocket phones with internet access have probably been the biggest industry disrupter of all industry disrupters in a way. Knowledge has always been power and now the knowledge is back in the hands of most of the people. Corporations that have got away with murder for years are finding it harder and harder to do so as people can call them out on it. I’ve been guilty of being down on the younger generations of late, the “entitlement” generation etc, but I’m seeing first hand more and more youngsters, probably the 18-23 generation I’d say, that are way more clued up on what’s going on out there and way more likely to question the status quo rather than be happy to be brain washed by whatever their families/schools “teach” them. I’m hoping the current generation will grow with a far greater compassion than some us before them, now that they can really see what goes on all across the world and not just like when I was a kid and once a year they show some starving Ethiopians on TV as part of the Comic Relief, sure, the pictures and stories were disturbing but it was so infrequent and so far away that it was hard to really connect with plus it was one-way traffic too, not like now where people can openly discuss such things from other end of the planet via something as simple as comments on a Facebook post. I’ve been very down on human race of late, but I am seeing light in the eyes of today’s youth that is giving me hope for some sort of decent future for the planet. I just hope we don’t have to go through a complete crash of everything before the rest of us wake up enough to see what’s going on and try to do something about it.
