Australian Childhood Foundation was honoured to be the nominated charity partner of this year’s Myer Precious Metal Ball, an annual black-tie event held at Crown, Melbourne.

Our CEO, Joe Tucci and Patron, Rosie Batty spoke to a room of over 1000 guests with an urgent call to the community to acknowledge the devastating impacts that family violence has on children.  We shared the story of 9-year-old Jonas who had lived through family violence and carried around feelings of shame and worthlessness until he met his therapeutic counsellor Karen who helped him to change his story of violation into a story of hope.

Guests were inspired to raise their hands and donate an amazing $212,015 towards our Bringing up Great Kids Program – Parenting after family violence.   This program is an innovative therapeutic program that provides mothers with the knowledge, skills and confidence to more accurately understand how family violence affects their children.

With the support of Myer we will now be able to support an additional 50 therapeutic staff nationally, enabling them to offer the program at a local level across our network of centres to 250 parents and 500 children per year.  We will also be able to deliver training to a community network of parenting group facilitators to implement the program, offering access to the program to around 1250 parents and 2500 children nationally.

Guests also supported fundraising efforts on the night by purchasing silent and live auction items and we’d like to thank our very generous prize donors; Abercrombie and Kent, Mazzucchelli’s Jewellers, A Day on the Green, Made in the Shade, Margaux and The Everleigh, The Teak Place, Nonna’s Cucina, Vuly Trampolines, Artist Photography and Marriot Melbourne.

We’d like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Myer and the Myer Community Fund board for allowing us the opportunity to raise our profile and significant funds to support our work through this event.

Thank you also to the generosity of our corporate partner EY for volunteering a group of their staff to help with the event set up.

Images by Charmaine Visuals and Myer.