“Every year that goes past, one person on this planet should be breathing easier because of you. It’s that simple. Make it your annual goal.”
It’s my closing statement. The one thing I always say to high school students when I’m invited to speak at their valedictory dinners or graduation nights.
This Christmas, there are so many with so little. Or, in fact, nothing. They are the people (and animals) who are forgotten, are unseen, as we dash around scooping up toys and hanging twinkly lights and butchering Michael Buble’s Christmas album and arguing about whether to serve trifle or pudding for dessert on Christmas day (I say trifle, because TRIFLE).
They are the women in shelters. The jobless men sleeping in cars or in city doorways. The children ricocheting between foster carers. Or living on the street. Or in homes where despair sits like a heavy fog around the kitchen table. They are the animals that are left, forgotten, rescued who have lost faith in the kindness of human beings.
And so it is up to us – you and me – to step up.
There are hundreds of ways to give back over the Christmas season but we thought we’d make it easy for you and list a few wonderful campaigns that will make your heart soar better than any Hugh Grant –Dancing-To-The-Pointer-Sisters movie.
Read this list. Pick one thing and do it this Christmas season. Santa will love you all the more for it.
1. The Pyjama Foundation
Over the last decade, the number of children living in foster care in Australia has doubled and as a group they have the worst educational outcomes of any group of children in Australia.