2025 WA Young Australian of the Year Jack Anderson

Australian Community Media

Meet your Australians - 2025 WA Young Australian of the Year Jack Anderson. ACM is proud to be media partner for the 2025 Australian of the Year Awards.

Transcript

00:00In Australia, your postcode is one of the strongest determinants of your educational

00:05attainment. When I was 18 years old, I started volunteering in low socioeconomic schools

00:10across Perth. And I quickly came to realise that comparative to my private school education,

00:15the reality was that these students had an education ceiling placed above their heads

00:19simply because they were born into a different postcode to me. And when I realised that reality,

00:24I knew that I had to do something about it. I started this education charity when I was

00:2818 years old. I gathered four of my friends together, and we had this idea of writing

00:33high school textbooks and selling them on a two for one donation model, where for every

00:36two we sell, we produce and donate a third to the library of a school in a low socioeconomic

00:41area. We started out with this simple idea of writing a year 12 chemistry textbook that

00:46was 500 pages long. And after 13 months of writing, we published our first book. And

00:51over time, we continue to publish the second, the third and the fourth. And this textbook

00:55model has been incredibly powerful, because it allows us to donate hundreds of textbooks

01:00to disadvantaged students and to go out into the rural communities and provide them with

01:03textbooks, laptops and tons of education resources to help them succeed in school. Over the years,

01:09we've expanded to over 70 volunteers, we have an incredible volunteer base ranging in fields

01:14from law to medicine, right through to engineering. And they're all exceptionally dedicated to

01:20this mission of wanting to bridge the education gap in Australia. The schools that we've been

01:24to go all across Western Australia from the Pilbara region, all the way to Kalgoorlie,

01:29right through to Dunsborough, and then heaps of low socioeconomic schools more across the

01:33metropolitan area, we have a charity that's driving huge amounts of impact for 10s of

01:371000s of young Australians. The moment I realised I was making an impact was when the teacher

01:42emails started flooding in, the students had been using our resources for roughly six months

01:47at that point. And we started getting a lot of messages from teachers and students letting

01:52us know that their grades were improving as a result of our resources. My ultimate

01:56goal is to provide our 750,000 year 10, 11 and 12 high school students with free access

02:02to the education resources that they need so that they can get the education that they

02:06truly deserve.

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