A SPECIAL function at the University of New England last week celebrated the success of the University’s Enactus Group. The inspiring students’ community projects have been judged the best in the country.
Enactus is a global organisation and from 29 September to 2 October, this spring, the UNE team will head to Cancun, Mexico for the Enactus World Cup, where their projects will be measured against those from universities in 39 other countries.
President of the academically diverse UNE Enactus volunteers (of varying years), Rachel Price explained how her team of 13 core members became the Enactus Australia Open Champions.
“In July, we attended a national competition in Sydney, where we competed against 21 other universities and won,” she said.
“We design and implement community outreach programs, with a foundation in business. Every year, we present the outcomes of our projects to a group of judges from businesses and academia.”
“This is such a remarkable achievement!” UNE vice-chancellor and CEO, Professor Jim Barber said.
“We’ve got a small regional university that has just taken out a major national competition, which brings together the best community projects and students from all over the country.”
“We’re seeing the culmination of years of work by students who have been volunteering on a number of projects, which have attracted national attention. Earlier this year, the students were flown to Canberra and actually influenced government policy. Their projects have gone beyond community engagement and development in this region; they are nationally important for social equality,” he said.
Rachel Price said it meant a lot for her team’s hard work and community outcomes to be recognised by their university. They worked over 5330 volunteer hours over the past year, raised just under $115,000 and directly impacted the lives of 1482 people.
She said the UNE Enactus Group developed three major projects.
“Farming Futures is a project we stage at UNE. We identified a need to bridge the gap between agricultural graduates and jobs – currently there is a four-to-one disparity between them. Our careers fair and industry dinner brings them together.”
“The other two projects have concerned Aboriginal and lower socio-economic portions of the communities in our region,” she said.
“We began with Fin-Lit, focusing on personal finance in local indigenous schools.”
In collaboration with the Community Mutual Group, this project led to another, when an identity crisis was realised. The Aboriginal children they were working with did not possess birth certificates. UNE Enactus’ Leader of the Fin-Lit and Minimbah projects Jason Artuso said that without a birth certificate, there could be no bank account, passport, driver’s licence or tax file number.
An inaugural Birth Certificate Access Event, facilitating free registrations for the vital document was conducted at the Armidale Aboriginal Minimbah Primary school in 2011. Three more took place in Armidale, Ashford and Tingha in 2012. Another recently took place at the Coledale Community Centre, with a large response.
Each year in Australia, an estimated 15,000 children are born without receiving a birth certificate. About one-third are Aboriginal; almost all are from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
The UNE Enactus students garnered the support of the Federal Attorney-General in a campaign for a streamlined system and free or reduced birth certificate fees nationally. Fees in NSW are ordinarily $48.
