Grammar Gazette- Issue 2, 2022

A Serving Purpose A spark for serving still shines brightly

Ms Stephanie Carter (2007) works for international consulting firm, Palladium, as their Global Internal Communications Manager. She returned to Brisbane in 2021 after spending three years working as Communications Manager on the Australian government funded Innovation for Indonesia’s School Children (INOVASI) project in Jakarta, Indonesia. Ms Carter has been passionate about the international development sector since leaving Girls Grammar.

My story began 16 years ago, at Brisbane Girls Grammar School, where I sat in an Assembly I listened as our teachers’ introduced plans for the Year 10 Community Service program In addition to describing expectations, requirements, and timelines, they also suggested a range of volunteering ideas, encouraging us to think carefully about how we might allocate our community service hours I didn’t know it at the time, but that day and that Assembly was the moment I embarked on a journey that I am still on to this very day—forming the foundations of my professional career, and personal purpose Later that evening, I recounted the events of the Assembly to my mother, and she made a suggestion: ‘Why don’t you come and help tutor some of the students in my class’? At the time, my mother was a Year 5 teacher at Moorooka State School, teaching a class that included newly arrived refugee students from Liberia, on Africa’s West Coast Their mothers had come to Australia on Women-at-Risk Visas, with support from the Australian Red Cross, and the students were now finding their way in a mainstream Australian classroom. The two weeks that I spent at the school transformed what I thought I knew about the world, and I cannot put a price on what I learned during that time Each day I sat with one of the students and together we worked on basic literacy and numeracy It was difficult to fully grasp what the girls and their families had been through, having spent extended periods of time in refugee camps in Liberia and then

Guinea, caught up in a devastating civil war I also learned that the Women-at-Risk program was aimed at women who no longer had male relatives and were at risk of serious abuse because of their gender As the days went by, I began to make sense of the girls’ hardship and resilience through shared stories, and when I completed my community service hours, we continued to trade letters back and forth I returned to School hungry to learn more I had a newfound sense of what justice and service looked like, but I wanted to better understand the depths of those complex social, political, and economic forces that shape our world and the lives of so many—including the girls I had met at Moorooka State School Indeed, these are issues that I continue to understand and unpack in my professional career today As a senior at Girls Grammar, I began spending more time volunteering with World Vision Australia, something that was wholly encouraged and supported by the School, and in Year 12, I was both Community Service Captain, and a World Vision Youth Ambassador As part of my Ambassador role, I travelled to Laos in the school holidays and met with families living in overwhelming poverty in both rural and urban communities The stories of the women and children that I met moved, shocked, and inspired me, and opened my eyes to a culture so different to my own. I also saw how the effects of malnutrition, lack of access to quality education, poor sanitation and healthcare can fall so heavily on women and their children, exacerbated by invisible biases and barriers to equality ▶

above Ms Stephanie Carter (2007) addressing students at the Foundation Day Assembly in 2021

Gazette

Brisbane Girls Grammar School

30

Issue 2, 2022