We recently spent the weekend with the family and my Mum’s wonderful friends at North Stradbroke Island for her 60th birthday at their lovely holiday home. … but more on the 60th in my next blog post.. this is is specifically about the amazing work my Mum and some of her wonderful friends who were at the lunch do in their ‘spare time.’
For almost as long as I can remember going to Straddie every summer, I can also remember my mum going off to these ‘woman’s meetings’ every week. ”They do good stuff for the community” is how I knew it. ”Kind of like Rotary but for woman” was how I explained it.
They are Soroptimists.
Soroptimist International (SI) is a world wide organisation for women in management and the professions working through service projects to advance human rights and the status of women. Soroptimists work at all levels of civil society, local, national and international, and are involved with a wide spectrum of women’s concerns.
My Mum and her friends are part of the South West Pacific region and do some absolutely amazing work to better the lives of woman and children in their community. It is only as I have grown older that I realise how amazing their work really is and how under-recognised it is. There are endless projects that I could tell you about such as:
- The provision of hand made library bags to local under privileged children who don’t have a library bag, sometimes a plastic bag is the best they have but are not allowed to hire school books with these. The library bage they provided enabled under privileged children the access to book hire at school. And yes this is an issue that many children are faced with in your community here in Australia.
- Each year the Beenleigh club recognises outstanding achievement by a local year 12 female and awards a bursary to them to assist them with their tertiary education.
- On a larger scale you can read about their Birthing in the Pacific project where they are working to decrease maternal morbidity and mortality in Papua New Guinea, you can read about it here.
My Mum, who I am so proud of for all the endless hours she passionately pours into this worthwhile organisation, has written a detailed blog post about one particular project called SKIP - Supporting Kids in Plight (SKIP). This is a project which provides life diaries to children in long term foster care through partnership with the local government department of communities.
I’d love for you to take the time to please read it and see what great work these ladies do and pass it onto anyone who might be interested.
