From the farm to the future

The Country Education Foundation of Australia is helping regional and rural kids – and their communities – unlock their full potential. 

 

The work of the Country Education Foundation of Australia (CEF) is based on a powerful premise: that education changes lives, families and communities.

 

CEF, founded in the town of Boorowa in the New South Wales Hilltops region in 1993, puts this premise into practice by supporting hundreds of regional, rural and remote students every year, giving them practical assistance to access the kind of education, training and employment opportunities that can be scarce or prohibitively expensive outside of capital cities.

 

The results can be profound. CEF aims to uplift not just individuals, but entire communities. CEF’s 2024 Student Impact Report found that up to 81 per cent of recipients intend to take their new skills back to a regional area. “When you support the potential of a young person – and we are supporting nearly 800 of them [in 2025] – it’s an investment in the future,” says CEF CEO Wendy Mason.

 

Twenty-two-year-old Caitlin Porter is one of them. She grew up on a cattle farm in New South Wales’ Hunter Valley region, before losing her mother when she was 12 years old. This meant she learned to juggle housekeeping and caring responsibilities while assisting her dad to run the property and keep up with her primary and high school education.

 

Determined to carve her own career, Porter was accepted to the University of Canberra, 600 kilometres from her home, where she is completing a Bachelor of Accounting. A CEF grant helped Porter both financially and with one-on-one mentoring from people in her own community. “I’m really grateful for the opportunity because it means I can focus on my studies instead of working two or three jobs to live out of home,” she says. “The support helps cover rent, utility bills, WiFi and textbooks. And it has even allowed me to make time for some social activities like rugby union and Oztag, which has been really good for my mental health.”

 

Other students who are supported by CEF’s 49 local foundations across New South Wales, Northern Territory, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia, have received monetary assistance to pay for fuel to travel long distances to university or apprenticeships, or have been helped to buy tools, technology or other equipment to pursue their higher education or training pathway.

 

To date, CEF has many success stories: from a young woman from Coolah in New South Wales who received help to complete her carpentry and joinery TAFE course, to a young man who was helped with relocation expenses to achieve First Class Honours in microbiology at the University of New South Wales.

 

For the first time this year, St George Foundation supported CEF with a $300,000 Inspire Grant, which will be leveraged across three years. Much of this funding goes towards engine-room operations that help CEF operate effectively: necessary services like IT and public liability insurance for fundraising events. “Their funding was really visionary,” Mason says. “They understand that the work can’t happen without investment and they provided lifeblood for the students we’re supporting.”

 

Mason says the three-year commitment is particularly welcome. “It means we can work together in a partnership, long term. That’s what we’re after: long-term outcomes.”

 

Caitlin Porter says that CEF has made a critical difference in her life, and she hopes to pay back their investment by using her skills in regional and rural Australia. “My goal is to work in the agriculture accounting sector to support farmers like my dad and other smalltown businesses,” she says. “CEF has really been amazing in helping me to make that happen.”