2021

APCO Foundation Chairperson’s Report.

I am going to start this on a positive note! This year we reached the $1,000,000 dollar donation mark! This is a milestone that we have reached with the support of our wonderful board, our tireless retail operators, our generous corporate community, and the ever patient and helpful support office. I am very proud of this achievement particularly as the last two years have been difficult ones for not only the foundation but the world around us.

We delivered 1000 care packs during the worst of the lockdowns and our last care packs were given out the week leading up to Christmas. We saved many international students who were starving as well as many families we helped survive the lockdown until their funding came through. During that time, we worked with the Geelong city Council, Barwon Health, Red frogs, Feed Me Geelong and many health workers such as maternal and child health workers, physios, and carers. We fed people from Mildura to Melbourne, and we should be very proud of what we achieved. Julie Baldwin was the driver behind this, and we could not have done this without her support. North Geelong and Support office were also very supportive of this project and helped us to keep this program going.

We are now donating monthly to Feed Me Geelong helping with the cost of their petrol. They deliver meals and food packs all over the Bellarine and Geelong areas to help those in need no questions asked. I would also like to thank our corporate partners Goodman Fielder, Bega, Nestle, Accredited and Mars Wrigley who donated and generously supported our care packs.

Covid-19 has been detrimental to our income streams. Our corporate support, Pure Wax money and our Wine Walk early in 2021 have not be there to add to our income. It is one of the reasons we have been so grateful that Ron, Peter, and Robert have continued to support the foundation so we can continue to help those in the communities around us.

We raised $151,489.59 and we donated back $188,198.96. In this environment people have been more in need than ever before and we have donated all the money we have raised over the year plus more.

The board are working hard to add income streams to the foundation. We are trialling a donation point tap point (add picture below) see below at two stores and hope that this will be a success.

We are still working on putting a donate button on our Facebook page, but this involves a lot of privacy and safety technology being put onto our website and the IT department are helping with this. We are looking into ways to engage the corporate community to support the foundation even more than they do already. The corporate community gave to 1.1 billion last year to the philanthropy community which was a 17% increase over the last 12 months. We need to tap into that income stream in the coming years.

Our Wine Walk was cancelled 17 hours out and we were to say the least devastated!

However, the generosity of the venues involved in not charging us for the food which would have already been prepared was extremely heart-warming and people leaving their ticket money in meant we raised $17,743.68 It was a sold-out event of 740 people. I would like to thank Events Geelong and Geelong Connected communities for their grants which we received for the wine walk in 2021. They are both great supporters of the foundation and the Geelong community.

Race for a Reason ran this year and who knows how but we snuck it in between lockdowns. It was so lovely to see people and have a day out where we could dress up and enjoy being with other people. We had David Parkin, Shane Crawford and Billy Brownless and some great auction items. We raised $50,977 dollars.

The APCO foundation working together with our retail operators placed Defibrillators into the stores over the past years and I thought it was mentioning that this has saved 3 lives which I think is an incredible result of this project and well worthwhile.

Our goals of 2020 remain the same as last year. We really need to build our social media and to continue to build our income streams.

Our social media presence and our website

We are getting better at this. Support Office have taken this role and we have a system where we write up the posts for the month and they are posted gradually over the month. We have upgraded our website and we are working a system to have this updated weekly.

To continue to build on our income streams

We have introduced a trial of a quest donation tap point at 2 of our sites to see if it is viable to put this donation tap points into all stores. We are working towards a new project which we have yet to name but will tap into all our communities and corporate partners. Watch this space!

Build the awareness of the APCO Foundation throughout the community.

The awareness of the APCO foundation is growing throughout the community. Every donation, every social media post, every event is growing the numbers of the people around our local areas that support and are aware of the foundation. I have some goals we need to achieve in this area and that is make sure we have a clear focus as we move forward. Lock down gave me time to reflect on the way the foundation is functioning and to make some goals to make sure that the foundation will continue to grow in the future. The board will work on our mission statement over the coming months to make sure we have clear and sustainable goals. I would like then to set in place internal evaluation of those goals and how we are making an impact in the community.

It is so important to have these clear goals to help the foundation move to another level.

The Foundation Board donated this year to many causes. The full list is attached below.

APCO Foundation retail operators were able to donate $3000 to a cause chosen by them. We have donated over $1,000,000 to the community in the past years (Yes, I thought it was worth mentioning again!) Woo Hoo!

We could not do this without the kindness and generosity of Support Office, our retail partners and our corporate partners valuing the work we do and giving us the financial support, we need.

We have a new board member this year. We welcomed Lynette Kennett in July on to the board. Lynette works for Accredited, and many of you will know her and how much of an asset Lynette will be to the board. The board is delighted to have her experience and knowledge and I look forward to learning from her over the coming months.

A very special thanks goes to the board. They give up their time and I harass them in between meetings with urgent bequests from the foundation. They all have special skill sets and help with the workload of running the foundation. It is not just about a monthly meeting for them, and they are incredibly kind individuals with the best interest of others at their core. The support that I receive from this board makes me very grateful.

The last two years have provided their challenges. The foundation has been affected financially, but we still gave as generously as we could. The support from us was certainly needed out in the communities. I look forward to the challenges of the future and in a world that has a vastly different landscape I know that one thing has not changed. Spreading kindness does little bits of good everywhere and it’s those little bits of kindness that add up and create change.