A recipient of Smith Family assistance is raising funds for the charity that helped her in her time of need.
Werribee’s Quyhni Nguyen, 20, pushed her co-workers at Officeworks Werribee to back the Smith Family’s Back to School appeal, in which customers were asked to donate money to help children get everything they needed to start the new school year.
The store raised $1540 and Ms Nguyen, who works at Officeworks casually while studying occupational therapy at university, was identified as the store’s biggest fundraiser.
“Donations were coming in quite slow,” she said. “I went home and reflected and came back to the team. We had a discussion about how we could improve the donations.
“We started off by mentioning the Smith Family name – and that worked.
“Then we started telling the customers what the back to school appeal was about, and after that they were more encouraged to donate.”
Ms Nguyen first came into contact with the Smith Family when she was 11 years old and her mum had been diagnosed with a brain tumour.
She stepped up and took on more responsibility around the household, caring for her two younger brothers and her mum, and as a result started falling behind in school.
That’s when her school put her in touch with the Smith Family’s Learning for Life program, which offered her tutoring and emotional support, and later, a scholarship for her university degree.
These days, her mother is cancer-free and Ms Nguyen said she was grateful for all the help she had received from the Smith Family.
