Hey there!
We’ve decided to start posting monthly updates so that you can get a better insight into what we’ve been up to! This is the first of many, and we’d love any feedback or for you to let us know what you want to hear about.
June has been a busy month for The VacSeen Project and we kicked it all off by meeting with the wonderfully vivacious Lady Mayoress of Brisbane, Nina Schrinner on June 2. We discussed grant opportunities to help support our ongoing work and connecting with similar organisations to increase our contribution to the local community.
Thanks to the overwhelming support from the community, we raced past our initial fundraising goal to support Inclusive Health in South Brisbane by purchasing 150 vaccines, and as such we were able to expand the scope of our project in its first year. We reached out to Brisbane Youth Service and provided them with 60 flu vaccines thanks, in part, to the support of the Neighbourhood Clinic in Bardon and Priceline Pharmacy Runaway Bay. Brisbane Youth Service does an amazing job providing a multitude of services, including health services, to those aged 12-25 years of age who are experiencing homelessness or other disadvantage. It was amazing to see their passion first-hand and be able to support them!
Jeremy and Hannah had the privilege of speaking to the YMCA Youth Parliament about how The VacSeen Project came to be on the evening of June 23. It was an amazing and humbling experience to impart some of the lessons that the team has learnt along our journey so far and the youth parliamentarians had many thoughtful questions that we took away from the evening. We would like to thank Jordan Duffy and the Youth Parliament for having us!
On Monday 28 June, we had a team bonding dinner (Lili outdid herself with a phenomenally delicious spread) and strategic planning session. We talked about the key steps we will take over the next 6-12 months to achieve some of our goals and look forward to sharing them with you as they eventuate! Jack was struck by inspiration and developed a new logo for the initiative, which will form part of us developing a more cohesive digital presence over the next few months.
Finally, we had several appearances in the media. Following up from Jeremy’s chat with Spencer Howson on 4BC weekend breakfast, he also talked to Craig Zonca and Loretta Ryan on 612 ABC Breakfast.
The University of Queensland Media Team, led by Robert Burgin, put together a wonderful piece about our initiative, which was picked up by a number of other news outlets, and received extremely positively by the community. We are hoping to do some more media appearances in the next week or two to expand awareness around The VacSeen Project and support our advocacy work, planned for later in the year.
Thanks to everyone who has reached out to offer their kind words of support and those who have offered to volunteer – we’re currently working through all of these so apologies if we haven’t got back to everyone yet!
Please do get in touch if you have any questions, suggestions, or interest in The VacSeen Project.
Yours,
The VacSeen Team x