By Monica Dan & Paola Longobardi | Founder & Trustee(s)
Dear friends,
The third and final term of the school year is now underway at Volunteers Foundation Academy, and our students have returned with renewed energy and enthusiasm for the few months ahead.
As we begin this final stretch of the academic year, we are reminded of something that is at the heart of everything we do: we achieve more when we work together.
VFA is much more than a school. It is a hub of connection, bringing together teachers, students, parents, alumni, trustees, volunteers and community organisations. Each partner contributes something different - knowledge, skills, time, ideas or opportunities - and together these contributions create a much stronger support system for our students.
This year, partnerships have continued to open new doors for our children and their families. Our collaboration with St Mary's Hospital supports students through health checks and youth programmes, while the Human Needs Project has brought opportunities including financial education for parents and alumni, IT training and support for community projects.
Our alumni are also becoming an increasingly important part of this network. Many are choosing to give back to the school that supported them, volunteering in the library, running clubs, helping in the kitchen and contributing to creative and community activities. It is one of the most moving parts of our work: watching a child we once supported grow up and return to support the next one.
None of these partnerships would exist, though, without something that comes first: our donors. Before there can be a hospital visit, a training programme or a classroom full of curious children, there must be someone who believes in what we do enough to make it possible. Every collaboration we are proud to share with you starts here, with you.
We feel this most of all when we think of those who gave so generously towards building our school. Good infrastructure is easy to take for granted, but it is everything. Those walls and rooms have become far more than bricks and mortar; they have become a safe place, somewhere a child can simply be a child. Within them, our students have belted out songs at singing contests, lost themselves in books during quiet reading sessions, and made the kind of small, beautiful memories that quietly shape a childhood. None of that would exist without the people who chose to build it. Our work now is to keep building on what they started, including finishing the boundary fence around the school, a project still underway where support continues to be very welcome.
For 17 years, this simple idea, that we achieve more together, has been changing lives, one student at a time. A child who once had no path to school now has a classroom, a teacher, a future. That has only ever been possible because people like you chose to stand behind us, year after year.
As we start this final term, we are asking you to keep standing with us. Whether through giving, volunteering, or simply staying close to our story, your continued involvement is what allows us to keep opening doors for the next child, and the one after them. Seventeen years in, we are just as reliant on you as we were on day one, and just as grateful.
Together, we can achieve more, and give our students more opportunities to thrive.
Monica & Paola and all at VF
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