Community Archives - The Burdekin Association

Fun run fundraising

August 23, 2024August 21, 2024

Did you know that you can become a Northern Beaches Hero and choose to fundraise for The Burdekin Association in the Beach2Beach Charity Fun Run and Festival on Sunday August 25?

All you have to do is go to the fundraising section, click on start fundraising and scroll down to select your favourite charity (Burdekin!) You have the option to register, start fundraising (easily set up your own fundraising page) or make a donation (sponsor a fundraiser or give directly to your charity).

The family friendly event offers three course options, catering to everyone from serious runners to families: a 14km route from Dee Why Beach to Newport Beach, a 6km route from Warriewood to Newport Beach, and a 3km route from Mona Vale to Newport Beach. The event promises an awesome atmosphere with live music, international food and fun activities for the kids all at the finish line.

We are also delighted that our community partner the Manly Warringah Sea Eagles is supporting us again too!

Keep in mind for next year that The Burdekin Association also registers for the infamous City2Surf, which this year took place on Sunday August 11. Described as ‘The World’s Largest Fun Run’, this epic 14km course takes you from Sydney CBD to Bondi Beach with a great party atmosphere. The 2023 event hosted 70,000 participants with over $2.9 million already raised for over 400 charities. Participants need to be very organised for this fun run and register early as it is guaranteed to sell out!

A charity fun run in Sydney for all the family — The whole family can join in.

Join us

We would like to invite you – friends, family, colleagues, partners and kind strangers to join us. Some of you will perhaps already be signed up or intending to just for the fun of it, and we ask that you consider joining our team and helping us to fundraise for our young people.

We think fun runs are a particularly great and risk-free way to raise money for your favourite charity. We also like them because:

Anyone can participate
It is great fun
It’s achievable for everyone
It is a shared experience with the community
If you want to get fit, it is a motivation to do so
If you want to raise funds for charity, it’s a great motivation to do so
It’s a great opportunity for making friends
It is less cost prohibitive than many other events
It connects us to the cause – youth homelessness
It promotes physical, social and emotional wellbeing
It promotes feelings of support and inclusion

What’s not to like? Would you consider joining us?

Tips for fundraising:

Some people find it challenging to ask for support for their fundraising efforts – but if you don’t ask, then people don’t know about it. Take Burdekin for example, we don’t like having to ask all the time, but without money coming in from friends, family, partners and philanthropists, we would never reach our fundraising goals.

As soon as you have committed to the event, tell your network of friends, family and colleagues about your efforts to run, walk, skip, hop – whatever way you want to roll – your way. We can help you with this email template that you can send to your contacts to ask them to support your fundraising efforts.

Email template

Dear (donors name),

I have exciting news! This August I have registered to participate in the Beach2Beach Fun Run and Festival (and/or) the City2Surf to raise money for a charity that is close to my heart.

The Burdekin Association offer an incredible service to children, young people and their families. They are passionate about creating solutions to solve the problem of youth homelessness in our community.

I hope that you will consider sponsoring me to participate in (name of run). Race entry fee is not part of my fundraising goals and I have paid for that up front. 100 per cent of all funds raised will go directly towards The Burdekin Association to help fund their support and responses to children, young people and their families.

Please find a link to my fundraising page: (insert link)

Thank you so much for your consideration,

Sincerely (participant’s name)

Northern Beaches - Beach2Beach Fun Run and Festival — For health, wellbeing and a great cause!

How to get started

Personalise your fundraising page: if there is an option to personalise your fundraising page – make sure you do it – add photos and other relevant details. People also love hearing from you – a short video or regular updates to your your page and socials, sharing your progress.

Entry fee: if you are concerned that people won’t support you because running is your hobby – make it clear that you are paying the entry fee yourself. Consider also donating to your own event, to start the ball rolling.

Friends and family: close friends and family have your back, so consider asking them to start the ball rolling with donations – a fundraising page that already has donations is more likely to receive more – strange, huh?

Social media: don’t be afraid to post to your social media networks – again, people can’t donate if they don’t know. If people don’t want to donate, they can just keep scrolling. Post regular updates, one post on your social channels may not be enough to reach many people in your network. Ask your contacts if they would be willing to share your fundraiser too. Ask the charity you are supporting (hopefully Burdekin) do give you a shoutout too – it all adds up!

Thanking people: please make sure to thank people for their support – it only takes a second and goes a long way!

After the event: you would be surprised how many donations come in after the event, make sure to update people after the event via email, text message and/or socials.

Team Burdekin

For the Beach2Beach Fun Run and Festival, teams of twenty-five people or more receive a guaranteed 25 per cent cash back to the charity they are supporting – the more people we can get on Team Burdekin – the more money we can raise for local youth! Team members will also receive a Team Burdekin t-shirt and if there is enough interest, we could organise group training sessions and a bus to the start line!

Partners

In the past we have been the very lucky beneficiaries of our partners’ fundraising efforts. In 2023, Manly Warringah District Club raised $8,262 for the Burdekin Association. If you would like your organisation to participate in any event, of which The Burdekin Association would be a beneficiary, would be delighted. Please let us know how we can help you with this, and as always, we are incredibly grateful for any and all support received.

Registration

There are a number of ways to register.

You can sign up as part of our team by selecting Team Burdekin in the registration process, or
You can register to support Burdekin and select – no to team.
If you are an organisation, you might have your own team set up and can still support Burdekin
Sponsor a runner – support a friend, colleague, or family member

Read more about Community Fundraising here.

Why giving back matters

October 2, 2024August 14, 2024

When we lift others up it's good for us too!

If you’re reading this, you are most likely someone who already knows why giving back matters and you most likely share our concern about social issues, including youth homelessness, and may want to do something about it. It is easy to feel overwhelmed and it is difficult to know where to start.

Many, rightly believe, that it is our moral obligation to look after those less fortunate in society. But, did you know that people who give back tend to be happier, healthier and live longer?

“If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody.”
Chinese proverb

The power of giving back

Volunteering your time, energy, attention, expertise and financial assistance doesn’t just make the world a better place, it also makes you better as a person. You could be the most successful person in the world, but what does it mean if we don’t use it to make a difference and share with others? True fulfillment in life comes from lifting each other up.

In times of uncertainty, nurturing empathy and kindness buffer us from the various negative narratives around us. In fact, being kind and altruistic can offer a solution to many of the problems we face as a society.

Kindness: The quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate. From a survival point of view, kindness makes sense – we have evolved to understand that kindness and cooperation means inclusion and safety.

Empathy: Humans are hard-wired for empathy. It helps us to connect with and respond to our babies, but it is also a skill that develops over time and is why, perhaps, some people are more empathetic than others.

Kindness and empathy are good for us as a species and because of this, we intuitively know that our happiness depends on the happiness of others.

Altruism: True altruism is the unselfish concern for other people, doing things out of a desire to help, not because you feel obligated to out of duty, loyalty, or religious reasons. Altruism is about reducing another’s suffering, without expecting anything in return.

Kindness is contagious: If you dropped a single pebble into still water, the water would ripple outward in widening circles. Kindness contagion is much like the ripple effect of the pebble and the water. Even just witnessing an act of kindness motivates us towards acts of kindness ourselves.

The ripple effect of doing good. — The ripple effect of giving.

Health benefits of giving

‘Helpers high’ refers to the feel-good chemicals our body releases when we do something good – release endorphins (oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine) – that make us feel good and therefore are ways of supporting our own wellbeing too.

As mentioned, we have evolved to understand that acts of kindness and altruism improve wellbeing and foster social connections – making us both personally happier and stronger and more resilient as a community. Doing good, makes you feel good, and because it is contagious, we do more good.

Wellbeing: Small and large acts of kindness help reduce stress, depression, anxiety and loneliness and increases our levels of life satisfaction, happiness and self-esteem, diverting our attention away from ourselves, giving us a sense of purpose. We can have all the success in the world, but if we don’t share the success with others – what does it matter? We need a community to belong to – something that is bigger than us.

Physical health: Giving back may also improve our physical health by lowering blood pressure, strengthening our immune system, staving off disease and lowering cortisol levels. Ultimately, helping us to live longer, happier, healthier lives!

Sometimes we will never know the impact we have had on someone’s life – so, do it anyway.

Do you ever experience helpers high? — You might never know how much your support means to someone.

Ways to give back:

Give time: get hands-on, we are always looking for volunteers to help us make a difference.
Expertise: do you have a special skill or service that could help us? Get in touch.
Partner: would you like to partner with us to solve youth homelessness?
Be a carer: Burdekin foster carers, care for children and young people in a variety of settings.
Fundraising: make a difference by fundraising for youth.
Donate: your donations make our work possible.

Further reading

Community in action

July 31, 2023July 21, 2023

We have the BEST community around us and it shows! Last week Burdekin and a number of our Manly fans were invited to attend the Manly Warringah Sea Eagles URM community round game day at 4 Pines Park in Brookvale against the North Queensland. What an incredibly exciting opportunity and our young people were thrilled!

And then there is Andre from Lion Window Cleaning who, with his colleague, provided complimentary window cleaning at one of our properties because he heard about our work and wanted to help!

Furthermore, we secured grants from the Lendlease Future Steps program and the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation. Read more about all of these wonderful examples of community spirit below.

Lendlease Future Steps program grant

We wanted to say a huge thank you to Lendlease and Bendigo bank for this incredible opportunity that will allow us to make significant improvements to the Burdekin Out-of-Home Care project. Please read what our CEO Justene had to say about it:

We are very excited to share the good news that we have been successful in securing a grant from Lendlease and Bendigo Bank with their Future Steps program improvements to the Burdekin Out-of-Home Care project. This grant means a lot to us. We are planning to utilise this grant for improvements to and an increase in bed capacity to our staff care home in Stanmore. We will be creating a self-contained Caretakers unit which allows us to convert the current staff bedroom into an additional client bedroom. This will improve the current staff office and accommodation as well as gives us more space to home an additional young person. The current office for staff also doubles as a bedroom. The improvements mean the house will qualify as a Semi-independent living (SIL) home once the works have been completed. We would like to say a huge THANK YOU to Lend Lease and the Future Steps program.
Justene Gordon, CEO

Manly Warringah Sea Eagles and URM – United Resource Management

The Burdekin Association — Justene (CEO) with Steve “Beaver” Menzies, a Club legend, and also Thomas Keneally, the famous author and die-hard Manly fan.

We celebrated the Manly Warringah Sea Eagles and our community at the recent URM community round game day with other local service providers. The event was a celebration of URM’s twenty six year sponsorship and partnership with the club and a really great opportunity for families and children to join the celebrations of belonging to a community.

For one home game per season, the Sea Eagles honour their community partners (WhatAbility, Youth Up Front) and us), recognising our work and the people. Our young people get free tickets to see the game, and some get to go onto the ground to watch the team warm up, and also form the guard of honour as the players run out for the match. This year the community partners were awarded a framed Community Round jersey (the players wore this special jersey just for this game – it’s the jersey the team wore in the 1950’s).

At half time there was a competition to push a giant football down the length of the field, and young people participated.

As always, we thank our partners for their continued support and opportunities like this for our young people – it was amazing!

Andre from Lion Window Cleaning

Recently, we needed the upstairs windows at one of our houses cleaned. We received three quotes including one from Andre. He then came back a couple of days later to say he would do it for free as he had seen what Burdekin does and so he was not going to charge us! So kind and much appreciated. Thank you so much. If you need your windows cleaned, please give Andre a shout at Lion Window Cleaning.

We have also been successful in securing a multi-year grant for the Learning Space from the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation and are ever so grateful and excited about this!

We can’t thank all of our supporters, small and large, enough.