Pro-bono Work
Via our Ignite business community initiative, MGSM offers charitable organisations pro-bono work where 5 to 50 of MGSM's brightest business minds work on solutions to a business problem within the organisation. Participating charities have included:
Botanic Gardens Trust
Eastern Sydney Division of General Practice
Surf Life Saving NSW
Clean Up Australia
Technability, The Spastic Centre
Mental Health Association NSW inc
Botanic Gardens Trust
The Botanic Gardens Trust is a statutory body of the New South Wales Government and is responsible for the management of three botanic gardens (Royal, Mount Annan and Mount Tomah) and the Domain. The Trust's mission is to inspire the appreciation and conservation of plants. Students from MGSM's Marketing Management class are currently developing an innovative marketing strategy for the Royal Botanic Gardens which will assist the Communications and Marketing branch promote the Trust's scientific, educational, horticultural, recreational and fundraising programs; the indoor and outdoor venues for hire; and raising the awareness of the Botanic Gardens Trust and its activities.
Eastern Sydney Division of General Practice
The vision of ESDGP is 'To support GPs supporting the Community'. The mission statement of ESDGP is 'To support GPs and their practices to best enable them to deliver health care to the local community'. Students from MGSM's Marketing Management class were involved on a project for ESDGP that aimed to improve immunisation coverage rates of children in the community. ESDGP has been in operation since 1993 with funding from the Department of Health and Ageing and has 200 members from a potential 434 active general practitioners in the area. ESDGP encourages GPs who would like practice support visits to join in promoting and supporting general practice and the role of GPs in the community.
Undoubtedly, surf lifesaving is written into Australia's history. From its fledgling beginnings as various Sydney Life Saving Clubs and brigades in the 1870s, surf lifesaving now has more than 110,000 members in more than 300 Clubs around Australia.
To keep our beaches safe, surf lifesavers patrol beaches from September to April. Each year surf lifesavers in 129 Clubs spend in excess of 270,000 voluntary hours patrolling more than 200 of the accessible beaches along the New South Wales coastline. Last season they performed 8,290 rescues, 142,019 preventative actions and treated 17,357 first aid cases.
Since recording began in 1949, Surf Life Saving New South Wales has saved more than 240,000 lives. Surf Life Saving New South Wales makes an invaluable contribution to New South Wales by providing safe and enjoyable destinations for all beach visitors.
It is thanks to the dedication and professionalism of these fine volunteers that New South Wales beaches are amongst the safest in the world.
Hence, Surf Life Saving's motto, which has not changed since its inception in 1907, is still as relevant today as it was at the time of the Association's formation.
Students from MGSM's Marketing Management class are currently working on a project to assist Surf Life Saving NSW in identifying their priority target markets, defining their respective product and service needs and aligning these with their existing activities to help identify future opportunities and areas for improvement.
Sixteen years ago 'an Australian bloke' had a simple idea to make a difference in his own backyard - Sydney Harbour. This simple idea has now become the nation's largest community-based environmental event, Clean Up Australia Day.
In the past 17 years, Australians have devoted more than eight million hours towards the environment through Clean Up Australia Day and collected over 200,000 tonnes of rubbish.
The next step was to take the concept of Clean Up Australia Day to the rest of the world. After gaining the support of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Clean Up the World was launched in 1993.
In its inaugural year, Clean Up the World involved approx. 30 million people in 80 countries.
The appeal of Clean Up the World (more than 35 million people from 100 countries annually take part) has demonstrated that this simple Australian idea has universal appeal and the health of the environment is of concern to people and communities worldwide.
Many communities have stayed with Clean Up the World since it began and report that not only do they feel empowered to act locally, they are further motivated through the knowledge that their local activities and achievements are shared by communities throughout the world.
Clean Up the World demonstrates that people across the planet are willing to do something themselves to help protect and care for their environment.
Since then Clean Up Australia has evolved into an organisation that works with the community, government and business to provide practical solutions to help us all live more sustainably every day of the year.
Under the banners Towards Zero Waste and Clean Water, Clean Up campaigns work towards achieving a world where humans can live in harmony with our environment.
MGSM Management Consulting and Research students are working on a project to assist Clean Up Australia in investigating how to expand the concept internationally and develop a model which can be rolled out, remotely and across different continents. In addition, MGSM students will assist with the development of an expansion and communication strategy within each region considering specific environmental issues in that region and determining the optimal communication methods.
Technability is a business service unit of the not-for-profit charity The Spastic Centre. The business service unit was established in the early 1990's to provide speech generating device technologies to Spastic Centre service users.
The Technability range of products includes high quality computer access products, mounting solutions, switches, special needs software, independence aids or environmental countrol units and speech generating devices.
The Technability vision is simple "Make high quality assistive technology products available to Australian consumers, add value to our customer's experiences with us and provide best-practice customer and product support at all times."
Students from MGSM's Marketing Management class are currently working on a project to assist Technability to respond to consumer requirements, competitor movements and to either formulate a marketing plan or determine the most suitable approach to increase sales revenue and promote sustainability of the business unit in a small yet competitive marketplace.
Mental Health Association NSW Inc
The Mental Health Association NSW Inc is a non-government organisation and a registered charity funded by Northern Sydney Central Coast Area Health.
The Association vision is a society that maintains, promotes and protects the mental health of everyone, a society in which people who have, or have had mental illness participate to their full potential in the community.
The mission of The Mental Health Association NSW is to promote opportunities for the people of NSW to achieve their optimal level of mental health through providing information services, education about protecting mental health, mutual support and advocacy services.
Major activities provided by the Association include provision of the Mental Health Information Service, the Anxiety Disorders Alliance, support groups (including training and establishment of new groups), mental health promotion, including the coordination of Mental Health Week in NSW and systems advocacy.
