AIEF

AIEF

AIEF

AIEF is a soon-to-be-launched non-profit charitable foundation with a focus on providing scholarships to Indigenous secondary school students to enrol at high quality boarding schools. It was previewed at a gathering hosted by Females in the Finance Industry (FiFi) on 1 May 2008.

AIEF has grown out of the success and learnings of the St Joseph's College Indigenous Fund (SJCIF) and the Indigenous education programme at St Joseph's College Hunters Hill in Sydney. This programme was described in the national media as "the nation's pacesetter in Indigenous scholarships" (The Australian 31 May 2008).

The aim of the St Joseph's College programme is to sustain around 40 Indigenous boys in boarding school each year. AIEF has been established to replicate, leverage and scale the success of the St Joseph's College Indigenous Fund to provide similar boarding school scholarships for Indigenous children at other high quality schools with a proven track-record in Indigenous education. Our initial target is to raise $5 million for boarding school scholarships for Indigenous girls, unlike the programme at St Joseph's College which is for Indigenous boys.

As we start our activities we will focus on girls' boarding schools in Sydney where AIEF is based so that we are able to engage with those schools with geographic proximity to AIEF and to minimise travel and related costs.

The focus of our scholarship programme is high quality schools with a proven track-record in Indigenous education. AIEF does not intend to allocate scholarship funds to schools in the start-up and development phases of their Indigenous education programmes. Many schools with a proven track-record in Indigenous education have gone through a number of iterations and approaches before working out which approach works best for them, and we do not intend to deploy the financial resources of our investors as schools go through those iterations. We believe schools in the start-up and development phases can utilise their own resources and those from people or businesses within their broad school community until they have a proven model that works at which point external funding (such as from AIEF) may be introduced to accelerate their growth.

• Kincoppal-Rose Bay School
• St Catherine's Anglican School for Girls at Waverley
• St Scholastica's College at Glebe
• St Vincent's College at Potts Point

AIEF does not process scholarship applications from individual students but does this via partner schools. Our partner schools will be responsible for all Indigenous student enrolments and acceptances themselves.

The AIEF Value Proposition

AIEF is in the business of empowering Indigenous children through high quality education, but we are not an educational organisation. This is a new and unique model of partnership between schools, businesses and the community, working together to increase opportunities for Indigenous Australians.

We aim to provide a highly efficient and effective tax-deductible means for corporate, private and philanthropic investors to invest in scholarships for Indigenous students to enrol at high quality schools with a proven track-record in Indigenous education. AIEF was established by the same individuals that initiated and led the successful St Joseph's College Indigenous Fund.

We have a 'private-sector' approach to fundraising, building organisational capability, achieving effective outcomes, managing and growing our assets and producing evidence-based results.

The AIEF approach means that investors in our Indigenous education scholarship programme can have a high degree of confidence in the ability of AIEF to manage their investment in Indigenous education in a framework of effective management, transparency and accountability - and without the need for individual investors to micro-manage or oversee individual school programmes themselves.

This approach creates an efficient environment for both individual investors and schools themselves because AIEF becomes the single point of contact and interface between a large and disparate group of investors and schools.

Further information will be available at www.aief.com.au later in the year and in the meantime enquiries can be directed to Andrew Penfold at andrew.penfold@aief.com.au