Meet your Australians - 2025 WA Young Australian of the Year Jack Anderson. ACM is proud to be media partner for the 2025 Australian of the Year Awards.
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00:00In Australia, your postcode is one of the strongest determinants of your educational
00:05attainment. When I was 18 years old, I started volunteering in low socioeconomic schools
00:10across Perth. And I quickly came to realise that comparative to my private school education,
00:15the reality was that these students had an education ceiling placed above their heads
00:19simply because they were born into a different postcode to me. And when I realised that reality,
00:24I knew that I had to do something about it. I started this education charity when I was
00:2818 years old. I gathered four of my friends together, and we had this idea of writing
00:33high school textbooks and selling them on a two for one donation model, where for every
00:36two we sell, we produce and donate a third to the library of a school in a low socioeconomic
00:41area. We started out with this simple idea of writing a year 12 chemistry textbook that
00:46was 500 pages long. And after 13 months of writing, we published our first book. And
00:51over time, we continue to publish the second, the third and the fourth. And this textbook
00:55model has been incredibly powerful, because it allows us to donate hundreds of textbooks
01:00to disadvantaged students and to go out into the rural communities and provide them with
01:03textbooks, laptops and tons of education resources to help them succeed in school. Over the years,
01:09we've expanded to over 70 volunteers, we have an incredible volunteer base ranging in fields
01:14from law to medicine, right through to engineering. And they're all exceptionally dedicated to
01:20this mission of wanting to bridge the education gap in Australia. The schools that we've been
01:24to go all across Western Australia from the Pilbara region, all the way to Kalgoorlie,
01:29right through to Dunsborough, and then heaps of low socioeconomic schools more across the
01:33metropolitan area, we have a charity that's driving huge amounts of impact for 10s of
01:371000s of young Australians. The moment I realised I was making an impact was when the teacher
01:42emails started flooding in, the students had been using our resources for roughly six months
01:47at that point. And we started getting a lot of messages from teachers and students letting
01:52us know that their grades were improving as a result of our resources. My ultimate
01:56goal is to provide our 750,000 year 10, 11 and 12 high school students with free access
02:02to the education resources that they need so that they can get the education that they
02:06truly deserve.