The Smith Family believes that education is one of the world’s most powerful change agents, and this leads our organisation’s activity and purpose. As such, our ambition is to provide our Learning for Life program to more young Australians for many years.
Given this core focus on education, we recently completed a review of our annual Toy and Book Appeal to measure how it supports our core focus and purpose. This review involved extensive consultation with many stakeholders including team members who work directly with families as part of this review. Through this process, we determined that we must prioritise helping children to achieve better educational outcomes.
This is particularly important since one in six Australian children are living in poverty — and this directly impacting their education. The demand for our Learning for Life program outstrips what we can currently provide, and at the same time, our goal is to meet this growing demand by providing the program to 100,000 children by 2027.
As a result, we have made the decision that the last Toy and Book Appeal will take place later this year, in December 2023.
Given the need to focus strongly on our core program of education support, the significant annual resources involved in running a one-off Toy and Book Appeal are better directed to supporting the education of children for the long term.
We will continue to hold our annual Christmas Appeal to fund education programs for children, and our sponsors will also still be able to elect to provide a Christmas gift to their sponsored student via digital vouchers or physical gifts. In fact, last year around 14,000 children in our Learning for Life program received a Christmas gift from their sponsor.
We wanted to provide as much notice to partners like volunteers and especially families in advance of Christmas 2024. Next year, we will ensure families know where to access Christmas gifts from other charities as needed.