RCHP Sponsors Five Yalari Students
Thanks To Hyde Park Rotary club for sponsoring 5 Yalari students to the Rotary Women's International Day Breakfast held at Pavilion on the Park.
A very well run breakfast, and everyone was delighted with the speaker CEO Sarah Brown, who was so entertaining are gave a great background to the history of the Purple House and its origins and purpose. The $5000 raised that morning will go towards more "Purple Houses and Purple Buses" that provide dialysis to indigenous persons with kidney disease to enable them to stay on country and this was so well explained by Sarah when she told the story how the art work (which is often created by indigenous groups meeting and creating such an art work) started the first 'Purple House:' when Packer bought a painting at a time when the government couldn't find its way to fund such an organisation. Since then Sarah has spoken to many groups including Rotary District Conferences and other groups and donations ensure that this has become a financial and social success to support dialysis near people versus them having to travel for hours and hours and stay away from their family without residential support and family support... thus sometimes opting not to undertaking the dialysis and dying.
This is a success story. The 5 Yalari students (including a male student)from Scotch College and the Yalari Co-ordinator Alison McCarthy and Sandra Matz's two grand-daughters and Colleen Ragghianti all thoroughly enjoyed the presentation and the sharing of the student's backgrounds (in fact on of the student's mother had worked at the Purple House in Alice Springs and she hadn't heard the full story), and were delighted with the amount of around $5000 that was raised that morning for The Purple House projects. .
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I know that the Scotch Yalari co-ordinator, Alison McCarthy was very appreciative from the student perspective to have the students listen to such a speaker that gave them a sense that people value their culture and a 'role model' type purpose to direct their future planning towards. Also the option of such students joining in our youth programmes was discussed with her and then reinforced by DG Robert Cooper to them all (and offered to other boarding students) as great community projects that could include youth especially the boarders from the country including the indigenous students. A very successful morning supported by the Hyde Park Rotary Club with options of future pathways with not only the Indigenous Yalari Students from Scotch, but other students and Boarding students that may wish to look at our Youth Programmes.