Whilst mindlessly scrolling on Facebook one evening our Managing Director stumbled across Brighter Day, a fundraising campaign facilitated by The Youth Insearch Foundation. We discovered that the organisation does groundbreaking research into youth suicide prevention and run many different programs for young people living with the effects of mental health issues.
This is the first year of the Brighter Day campaign, it’s purpose is to both raise funds and bring awareness to what has been described as the “invisible pandemic”, with youth suicide effecting 1 in 3 young Australians.
A&A support numerous young people living with psychosocial disability that significantly impacts their quality of life. As well as this, many of A&A’s staff have their own stories of lived experience with mental health issues and suicide; it was a no brainer that we were going to get behind this cause.
On February 17th A&A held an open house event at our HQ- Ohana House. Our biggest draw card for our event was a raffle in which local business generously donated thousands of dollars’ worth of prizes; we also offered a barbeque, face painting, hair braiding and a disco. We aimed to raise $2000, which we succeeded and surpassed with our total fundraising efforts coming in at $2,195.00.
We received some great feedback from community members of ways we could improve our event and it was suggested that it should become an inaugural event.
Once again A&A would like to give many thanks to the local businesses that donated prizes and resources for our event, to our volunteers for assisting everything to run smoothly on the day itself, to our staff for their many efforts and last but not least to our community for supporting us and for supporting this very worthy cause.