My own experience as a mum raising children and juggling work, often feeling torn between loyalty to an employer and caring for my children’s needs was the catalyst for my aim when establishing Macquarie Educational Tours, of creating sustainable employment for mums.
Being a small business gives us the flexibility to tailor each of our office team members’ hours to their own family life requirements, whilst still meeting our company’s needs.
Greg and I recognise and value healthy family life and have therefore created employment opportunities in which mums can drop children at school, be there to pick them up, attend key events and assemblies at school, have school holidays off to be with their children, and still enjoy meaningful employment which contributes to their family budget.
It may only be small, but we’re making a difference in the families of our wonderful team.
Our local church, Macquarie Life Church, has a community arm called Macquarie Care which helps the community in many ways. Read about their projects here http://www.macquariecare.org.au/
Macquarie Educational Tours supports some of these projects by:
Donating food to the Our Backyard Project which assists people living in their cars to have a safe place to stay. You can read about the Our Backyard project here http://www.ourbackyard.info/
Sponsoring girls to participate in the Shine Program reaching adolescent females in our local high schools, building resilience and disarming bullying. You can read about the Shine program here
This is a biannual, weekend road trip to drought affected towns in NSW.
The purpose of the trip is to inject funds into local communities by taking a coach load of people to rural communities for the weekend; people who need to buy accommodation, meals, and go shopping in local businesses. This is a welcome boost to struggling rural economies.
On top of that, each person’s seat price goes directly to farmers in need!
This fantastic concept is the brain-child of Ann-Marie Best and is organised as a Facebook Event.
Details of the September 2019 road trips –https://www.facebook.com/events/476099376287501/
A big shout out to a Grace Coaches – a fellow coach company that also supplies coaches for some of our Macquarie Educational Tours school excursion work. Grace Coaches has donated the services of a coach and driver for the first two We Care Road Trips.
Anne-Marie contacted us here at Macquarie Educational Tours asking for a coach for the March 2020 We Care Road Trip.
Macquarie Educational Tours is donating a coach and driver for the March 2020 We Care Road Trip – Watch this space for details.
If you would like to contribute, or book your seat for a fantastic weekend tour, making new friends, and learning first-hand about how the drought is affecting rural communities you can contact Anne-Marie via the facebook events page.
We’re excited to be involved in this fantastic project!
Greg and Heidi are on the committee for the Haynes Children’s Home in Tamil Nadu, South India where Macquarie Educational Tours donations have helped with several building projects over the years. Read about the Haynes Children’s Home here: https://hayneschildrenshome.weebly.com/
Haynes Children’s Home, India is a partner for Project J19ON The Ian Haynes Memorial Orphanages Inc with Global Development Group (ABN 57 102 400 993), an Australian DFAT approved Non-Government Organisation carrying out quality humanitarian projects with approved partners and providing aid to relieve poverty and provide long term solutions.
Learn more about Global Development Group here: https://globaldevelopmentgroup.org/au/
Want to know more?
Visit the Haynes Children’s Home website here: https://hayneschildrenshome.weebly.com/
Would you like to help?
Like and follow the Haynes Children’s Home facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/Haynes-Childrens-Home-India-114652278564336/
Come along to the next Trivia Night for the Haynes Children’s Home. It’s a fantastic event and you’ll be supporting a great cause!
Saturday 24 August – 7 – 9.30pm
Club Macquarie, Argenton
Purchase your individual seat ($20 per person) or book a table of 8 for $150 here:
Indigenous Literacy Foundation
“The Indigenous Literacy Foundation is a national book industry charity, which aims to reduce the disadvantage experienced by children in remote Indigenous communities across Australia, by lifting literacy levels and instilling a lifelong love of reading.”
Its vision is Equity of Opportunity and the Foundation delivers this through three core literacy programs which are all gifted free to communities. Importantly the Foundation only works with community engagement.
Coming soon –
I SAW WE SAW is a beautiful bi-lingual book written and illustrated by students from Nhulunbuy School in the Northern Territory in their first language, Dhanu a Yolngu Matha dialect. The ILF has published and helped remote communities across Australia create, write and illustrate 88 books – some in 18 first languages.
Watch this space for details of how to purchase copies of this book for your school library.
Macquarie Educational Tours supports the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, buying books for our MET library and contributing to ILF.
Find out more about the work of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation here
www.indigenousliteracyfoundation.org.au
Indigenous Literacy Day: Wednesday 4 September, 2019 – A National Celebration
“Indigenous Literacy Day is a wonderful opportunity to plan a Great Book Swap for your school community to support the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.
The idea is to swap a gold coin for a book.
The Great Book Swap is a fantastic way to celebrate reading locally, while raising much-needed funds for remote communities.
Schools, workplaces, libraries, universities, book clubs, individuals and all kinds of organisations can host one.
This year, our goal is to raise $350,000 to gift 35,000 new, carefully-chosen books to children who need them the most.
To celebrate the UNESCO International Year of Indigenous Languages, we’re excited to assign a language ‘House’ when someone registers, named after four different animals in Aboriginal languages.
You’ll have exclusive access to a host of fantastic language-themed resources including teachers’ notes, fact sheets, maps, videos and books written by children in their House’s language.”
The houses are:
Yirrikipayi House (saltwater crocodile in Tiwi, NT)
Lungkura House (blue-tongued lizard in Walmajarri, WA)
Wamparla House (possum in Arabana, SA)
Bigibigi House (pig in Kriol, NT)
For more information click here: www.greatbookswap.org.au
Indigenous Literacy Day 2017
We were thrilled to be invited to the 2017 Indigenous Literacy Day celebrations at Sydney Opera House where students and community elders from Yakanarra, a remote indigenous community in the Kimberley region, performed songs from their Yakanarra Song Book, in their native language Walmajarri and in English.
“This beautiful book includes fourteen songs, ten in Walmajarri language and four in English, all beautifully illustrated by the kids from the Yakanarra Community School. There are songs about how the Walmajarri came to Yakanarra, their special places, the animals and birds and the sound that they make, hunting, fishing and collecting bush food, and more. The songs, sung to the tunes of well known classics, were written to help the kids at Yakanarra speak Walmajarri, but this is a book to be reassured and enjoyed by everyone.
I found the experience quite emotional – hearing native Walmajarri language being sung and spoken in the Sydney Opera House, on Bennelong Point known to the local Gadigal people of the Eora nation as Dubbagullee.
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