Over the years, one of the nicest things we’ve noticed at TCG and Scola is how many new families come to us because another family has mentioned us to them. It might be a friend looking for a school, someone at work asking where your child goes, or a conversation between parents at the park.

Families have been doing this for years and, most of the time, we don’t even know about it.

That became the starting point for Project Give Back. We realised that if families are kind enough to talk about us and introduce other families to our little schools, the least we can do is make sure we say thank you.

So, if someone you know gets in touch with TCG or Scola because you’ve spoken to them about us, please ask them to mention your name when they enquire. We really do need them to do this, otherwise we may never know that the introduction came from you.

If they decide TCG or Scola is right for their family, enrol and spend their first month with us, we’ll cover the out-of-pocket gap for one normal week of your child’s booked days, after CCS has been applied.

For example, if your child usually attends three days each week, we’ll cover the gap you would ordinarily pay for those three days.

There’s nothing families need to register for and we certainly don’t expect anyone to go out and promote us. This is really just about recognising something our families already do and giving us the opportunity to say thanks when it happens.

From a thank you to something bigger

The more we thought about this, the more we realised that the same principle could apply more broadly.

TCG and Scola are small, independent schools. We’ve been able to grow because local families have chosen us, stayed with us, supported our events, recommended us to their friends and become genuinely involved in our community.

We thought we could probably be a little more deliberate about returning some of that support.

That’s what Project Give Back is intended to become.

It isn’t one particular programme or an annual fundraising event. It’s an umbrella for the different ways we can support our families and the wider community throughout the year.

Some of those things may be quite small. We’ve talked about things that could make busy mornings or evenings a little easier for parents, ways we can help families when life gets particularly hectic, and opportunities to use the resources we already have in ways that benefit people beyond our normal day-to-day work.

Other parts of Project Give Back will hopefully have a much wider impact.

Working with Youth Futures WA

One organisation we’re particularly interested in supporting through Project Give Back is Youth Futures WA.

Youth Futures works with young Western Australians who are experiencing disadvantage, including young people facing homelessness and housing instability. Their work includes accommodation, education, wellbeing support and helping young people build the skills and stability they need to move forward.

There is an obvious connection between some of their work and what we do every day.

In particular, The Nest supports young parents who are experiencing homelessness or unstable housing. As two schools built around children and families, supporting young parents to create safe and stable lives for themselves and their children feels like a very natural fit for us.

We’re looking at how our relationship with Youth Futures can become a meaningful part of Project Give Back, rather than simply making a donation and moving on. We’d like to find ways for our community to understand the work they do, support it when appropriate, and hopefully contribute in ways that are genuinely useful.

You can read more about Youth Futures WA here and find out more about ways to support their work here.

Bringing the children into it

There’s also an important educational side to Project Give Back.

We spend a lot of time talking about the sort of people we hope the children at TCG and Scola will become. Things like kindness, empathy, fairness and responsibility are difficult to teach meaningfully if they only ever exist in conversations with adults.

Where it makes sense, we’d like the children to be involved in Project Give Back too.

That doesn’t mean explaining complicated social issues to young children. It can be much simpler than that. They might grow something for someone, help prepare something that is being donated, collect useful items, participate in a fundraiser or learn about why we’re helping another group of people.

For our youngest children, the understanding might simply be that we can do something kind for somebody else. As they get older, those conversations can become a little more sophisticated.

It gives us another way of helping children understand that they are part of a community and that being part of one involves contributing to it as well as benefiting from it.

Where Project Give Back goes from here

We don’t want to over-engineer this.

Some ideas will work and become part of what we do each year. Others might be useful for a particular period and then disappear. We also expect that families, educators and the children themselves will come up with ideas that we haven’t considered.

The important part for us is simply becoming more conscious of the opportunities we have to help.

We’re fortunate to have two communities that have supported TCG and Scola enormously over the years. Project Give Back is our attempt to make sure that support doesn’t only travel in one direction.

And for our existing families, the first part is very simple: if you’re already telling people about TCG or Scola, please make sure they mention your name when they get in touch.

You’ve been doing it for us for years. We’d just like the chance to say thank you.