Aussie project to aid SA students
DISADVANTAGED students could soon be given a helping hand thanks to a mentoring programme that has proved so successful in Australia it is being offered to South African universities.
The programme called Aime – Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience – was explained to a group of university executives at a function hosted by the Australian High Commissioner, Adam McCarthy, in Pretoria last week.
Started by Jack Manning Bancroft when he was 19, an aboriginal undergraduate student on a scholarship at Sydney University, Aime links mentors at university with indigenous Australian mentees at school, giving them vital support to help close the inequality gap and provide them with an improved chance of success.
Explaining the concept in Pretoria, Aime director Jeff McMullen referred to Nelson Mandela’s belief that education was the most powerful weapon to change the world.
Aime reaches out to the young aboriginal child as it does to the young black South African child, and says: “You have a voice, you have a talent inside you, you have the potential, there is a way you will be seen and succeed,” he said.
Relationships
The model partners young people who are only a few years apart in age “but worlds apart” in the environments in which they have been raised and in their relationships to education.
McMullen, a journalist and human rights activist, relayed the story of Bancroft, who paid his advantage forward by seeing it as a personal responsibility to help disadvantaged aboriginal students in high school who may not, like him, go to university or even finish high school.
Over the past 12 years, the award-winning model has helped thousands of aboriginal children, who may otherwise have failed, complete their schooling, attend university and secure employment.
The success was due to the power of the human relationships that developed, and transformative connections which went beyond those that could be achieved in other outreach or internship projects.
It has shown across 18 campuses that it helps to close the educational gap and that it was possible for children who started at a disadvantage to go into the world and succeed.
Not only did it change the children’s perceptions around their identity and sense of being doomed to fail, it also changed perceptions around public schools and those who attended them.
Having heard a strong case made, local universities have until the end of August to decide if they will get involved and put forward the names of students or alumni aged 18-30, to potentially win one of 10 “golden tickets” to bring Aime into their university.