A Victorian student has raised almost $5,000 for a primary school in the Northern Territory that missed out when Katy Perry chose an elite private school as the winner of a performing arts video competition.
The touring pop singer awarded $10,000 to Loreto Mandeville Hall College in Toorak, Melbourne, over 300 other entries, including the relatively under-resourced Clyde Fenton school in Katherine.
The story of Clyde Fenton inspired Natasha Joyce, 39, to begin a crowd-funding campaign, which has raised several thousand dollars for the primary school through private donations and the campaign’s FundRazr page.
Among the donors are former students and parents of Loreto Mandeville. Another parent wrote to Joyce reporting that her daughter had attended Perry’s Melbourne concert and chosen to donate the $50 she would have otherwise spent on a merchandising T-shirt to the campaign.
Joyce has firsthand experience of the gaps in opportunity between urban and regional Australia. After years of living in Melbourne, she returned to her hometown of Bendigo to be closer to her family and study for an arts degree. She had recently resumed making art, having dropped the subject in high school because her family couldn’t afford the cost of materials.
“Rather than moving to the next hashtag issue, I chose to act,” Joyce said. “Clyde Fenton having an arts program is a luxury that the school would normally never be able to consider and I wanted them to have some creative options open to them.”
Joyce puts in two to three hours each day running the project’s social media, processing donations and reaching out to media and potential donors.
Clyde Fenton’s principal, Warwick Peter-Budge, said media coverage led to several offers of financial support from the public, calls he now directs to Joyce’s fundraising page. Joyce had been periodically transferring the money raised into the school’s bank account, he said.
“We’re really grateful for the public interest and the fundraising opportunity,” Peter-Budge told Guardian Australia. “It hasn’t been a massive windfall, but it’s certainly been better than selling raffle tickets in town, which is what we usually do.”
A 2013 report on rural poverty showed young people in rural and remote areas were less likely to complete high school and enter higher education.
Clyde Fenton, in the Northern Territory town of Katherine, is attended by nearly 250 children, more than 60% of whom are Indigenous. The school provides basic care few private schools need to offer, including a breakfast program, a pool of clothes for students to use and extensive support for behavioural issues.
“A large number of our kids come from home backgrounds that are pretty destabilised, where they’re not getting a lot of their basic needs met, be it financial or other forms of care,” Peter-Budge said.
He was quick to stress that Clyde Fenton was hardly the poorest school in the nation, but said Loreto Mandeville was “much, much better resourced, what with the fees they can charge parents and the funds they get from government on top of that”.
