Who We Are
Make A Difference is a growing charity with a big ambition.
We are dedicated to helping a small group of children and young people who generally won’t get involved with support agencies. We engage with hard-to-reach children in the highest category of need.
In keeping with our philosophy and our model, we support these kids over many years. And we, the staff and 40 volunteer adults, have regular retreat weekends together with them several times a year. In that process, we all become important to each other.
We believe all children need an adult to be connected to, so we give our kids adults to be connected to.
They connect with each other too, and that’s just as important.
We stay involved with the young people we support, from when they’re around 10 years old, until they grow up and beyond. We find it changes their futures.
They will always be able to know us if they want to because we become like family.
It is never time to stop seeing the people who matter.
Our children and young people have a level of strength, courage, and beauty within them that is hard to imagine but easy to see when you get to know them.
We have fun together, and we support them in a million ways as they navigate the challenges of their lives. We encourage our children and young people to dream dreams for themselves, and we help them fulfil those dreams.
We stick together through the hard times.
We love our kids, and we love being important to them. We try to ensure that everything we do is innovative, creative, fresh, inspiring, and respectful toward them.
We know they deserve the very best, and we try always to be that for them.
Our Future
Our plans involve expanding our retreat program to support up to 30 young people – doubling the capacity of our current program.
The speed with which we achieve this goal will depend on our capacity to generate further funding for our work, particularly the funding for more paid staff hours for engaging with and supporting our kids.
Then, it may take weeks or months of one-to-one relationship-building before they are ready to participate in a camp. It is inevitably a slow process.
We have our model, and we have the property and some funding to develop the property.
Further funding will allow us to increase our staffing and grow the program.
Make A Difference does not receive any ongoing government support, so we are totally dependent on donations. The money we raise ourselves funds our operations.
We operate primarily in the west and southwest of Sydney and the Shoalhaven (Berry to South Nowra) in New South Wales.