Where did Trials for Charity come from?
Earlier this year, Selena & I started a conversation with the Edufolios community of followers and customers about a concept called Trials for Charity – If you missed our live session on Facebook you can watch it below. The basic premise was to introduce a facility for new customers to trial Edufolios by donating a small fee to charity, as such trying out a cool new solution knowing that the amount you’ve paid has gone to a really deserving cause.
Since then we’ve talked with a few different Charities, to try and figure out how we could make this all happen – neither Selena nor I have every worked directly with Charities before, so it’s all completely new to us. All we knew is we wanted to make it work!
Getting Trials for Charity Moving Forward
We had a few ideas, and wanted to try and mould the Trials for Charity concept around them:
- It would be a small, but significant, donation to Charity that we’d look to exchange for 30 a days trial of Edufolios.
- We’d want to ‘share the love’ as much as possible by being able to work with multiple charities and look to change who the donation was being made to – each School Term perhaps? (Eventually, it would be great to enable customers to select the Charity they wanted the donation to go to – but one step at a time.)
- We wanted to set a target that we could share and track on the homepage of Edufolios site, giving everyone visibility of how well it was going.
Early on we met with Lauren Dimas (Head of Partnerships) at SYC, who showed us around their office in Adelaide and explained some of the work and services they provide – last year helping more than 55,000 people across Australia in the areas of Learning, Wellbeing, Home & Working! Their team were all lovely, and obviously super passionate about the work they do.
Lauren introduced us to their youth services division, HYPA (or Helping Young People Achieve) which provides a wide range of support to young people to find and harness their talent for a positive future; they’ve literally supported thousand’s of young people since starting the division back in 1958! The core focus being to help young people access and maintain safe and appropriate accommodation, to reconnect with family, school, employment and community.
Why we're working with HYPA
The HYPA division of SYC, entirely resonated with Selena & I. Their focus on providing learning opportunities to disadvantaged young people and ensuring their wellbeing was something we felt certain that Educators would relate to as well.
For instance HYPA provide some awesome initiatives…
- YouthStreet Library Initiative: Provides support for young people aged 13–25 who access HYPA services. The YouthStreet Library can provide breakfast, access to books, a range of learning resources; and access to self-care, life skills and recreation programs to young people
- Youth Justice Flexible Learning Options (FLO): Offers a specialist Juvenile Justice Flexible Learning Options (FLO) service for young people. This service supports young people across metropolitian Adelaide who have had contact with the Youth Justice system and require an intensive outreach support service.
…to name but a few. Please check out their website on some of the other Learning initiatives they provide to young people in need.
HYPA felt like a perfect fit, so we asked Lauren and the team to join us as we attempt to raise an initial target of $500 through Trials for Charity! If we can raise more, then we’d be super happy! Lauren and the team at HYPA are pretty excited too!
"HYPA is thrilled to be Edufolios first Trial for Charity beneficiary. Working with young people to stand on their own #TwoFeet, Learning in an alternative education setting is one of our four focus areas of work which also includes Home, Wellbeing and Working. Within Learning, we support young people to transition back to mainstream school, training and employment, and we are very pleased to be partnering with an organisation providing innovative solutions to professional support and development in the education sector. HYPA is very much looking forward to working with Selena and Matt at Edufolios as they support more educators.”
Thanks to you, a $5 donation in return for a 30 day trial of Edufolios will enable one young person to access the HYPA Breakfast Club for one whole week. That’s a guaranteed great start to the day for someone who might otherwise go hungry, all whilst you explore and get to know the Edufolios platform.
When can I help local kids?
As of Wednesday the 17th of August, our Trials for Charity program will be live and ready to roll. We’ve launched a few changes to our Edufolios platform to support getting everything in place:
- There will be a new option on our Sign Up page called Trials for Charity which has been set at a value of $5. All new customers can sign up with this option and get access to Edufolios for 30 days, wherein the money they’ve paid will go directly to HYPA. After 30 days, if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve seen, you can subscribe to one of our annual plans. If not, then we still think you’re awesome for donating to a really worthy cause!
- Our homepage will include a section called “Giving Back” which talks about the Trials for Charity program and shows a live total of the funds raised for charity so far by Edufolios’ customers. When we change charities we’ll reset the counter, and likely show both a subtotal for the current charity and an overall total of funds raised by the program.
Now to the important bit…
How can you help?
For our target of $500, we’ll need to reach 100 new educators, and have them buy a Trial for Charity. So the challenge is simple, we need you to tell people about #TrialsforCharity, help them to understand what it’s about and get them to donate $5 whilst trying out Edufolios for 30 days.
Please spread the word by sharing our message – we’ll post a link to this article on Facebook and Google+. We’ll need every bit of help we can get to hit our target, the more places you can share this the better.
To find out how your business/school could help raise awareness/funds for this awesome charity, or for more general questions about SYC / HYPA, contact Lauren Dimas (Head of Partnerships, HYPA) on 0478 404 457 or ldimas@syc.net.au or please use their online contact form and a member of the SYC / HYPA team will get back to you asap!
