Little Paths

10G’s Social Enterprise

Over the last term, all year 10 tutorial classes had been set the challenge of creating our very own social enterprises. With the aim of combating local social issues, this is our (Class 10G’s) story.

We started off firstly brainstorming issues we’d like to solve, concluding that we’d like to focus on such problems, as the recent plastic bag ban in the major supermarkets as well as aiming on having an emphasis on education. This led us to discover the fact that our teacher, Miss Gollan actually knew a woman in Tanzania who works with the non-profit organization Little Paths. We jumped on the opportunity to contact her finding out that she worked with students of a similar age living in poverty in Mwanza, Tanzania. We also found out more about “Little Paths” learning about how they provide funding for children in poverty to gain an education. We were incredibly impressed by this as it could directly fulfil our criteria of helping to educate. We swiftly came up with a plan to incorporate our other passion for the environment, getting the African students to create colourful bags, made from traditional fabric. We then planned to sell the bags here and send back the profits for educational items for the students.

Once we had a fully fleshed out plan it was time to put it into motion. We knew that to be as successful as possible we needed to delegate out the many roles so that everyone would have something to do, maximising our efficiency. We had some students write various emails to our parents as well as local businesses, asking for donations to pay for the shipping, people designing digital and non-digital posters and tags for the bags, people creating detailed accounts for our enterprise keeping track of all expenses, and many more individual jobs.

After an excited wait we received forty of the bags by post, an amount that we quickly sold out of at $10 each! Because of the ease in which we sold the bags it was obvious to us that we could do more. So that was what we did, ordering 100 more bags. With the extra bags still on their way we are estimated to earn $1000 more, something that when added to the $400 will surely make a big difference for the young people in Mwanza, and something that we are very proud of.

We would like to thank two special families; Teresa & Paul Haar and Karina and Richard Henley who donated very generously as well as Bendigo Bank, our local community bank.

https://www.littlepaths.org.au/

Many thanks

Jet on behalf of 10G Tutorial Class