AIME students are leading the way in closing the gap on post-school pathways into university, further education and training and employment.
Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) have an inaugural "Co-CEO." Her name is Marlee Silva, and for the next 12 months, she will be working alongside CEO and founder Jack Manning Bancroft, learning new skills to enable her to continue in executive roles in future years.
Established in 2005, AIME is a mentoring program that supports Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students with education and employment pathways through high school/ university, employment or further education.
Miss Silva is a twenty-year-old First Nations woman. Her family is from the Moree and Kempsey regions of NSW.
She told Living Black Radio that she feels so incredibly inspired to see how exciting the next generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are.
The things that they can do at such a young age without even realizing how amazing they are.
She wants to send the message that the public should be excited for what’s to come for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people saying "that there are thousands of kids out there who are pretty special and far as she’s concerned they can take over the world."
A message from AIME on their Impact to Date
In 2014, 93.2% of our Year 12 cohort completed Year 12. This was 6.7 percentage points higher than the national non-Indigenous Year 12 attainment rate and 34.7 percentage points higher than the national Indigenous rate.
In 2014-15, 76% of AIME Year 12 students transitioned into positive post-school pathways, 36 percentage points above the national Indigenous rate of 40% and just above the national non-Indigenous rate of 75%.
An independent economic evaluation conducted by KPMG found AIME contributed $38 million to the Australian economy in 2012. For each $1 spent on the AIME program, $7 in benefits was generated.
http://www.australianoftheyear.org.au/alumni/connect/jack-manning-bancroft/