It’s been a particularly special year for ABCN as we celebrated 10 years of partnering business with education. In doing so we also celebrated and acknowledged not only the hundreds of students and schools who have benefitted over the years from our mentoring programs, but also the incredible staff from our member companies who bring them to life.

Highlights for 2015 include record-breaking program numbers with over 4,000 students being mentored by more than 3,000 volunteers. School partnerships grew to 175, enabling the delivery of close to 500 programs nationally and our first ever program in the Northern Territory – a Career Choice Day with the Australian Defence Force and Casuarina Senior College in Darwin.

Our newly established Development Hub allowed us to innovate and successfully pilot a number of new programs in partnership with our member companies. These include working with PwC on Innovate, and J.P. Morgan on InRoads – both of which emphasise Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) as a new area of focus for ABCN. Leadership programs included working with American Express on Leaders of Tomorrow and with MCI on the Future Influence-Her event. And we also started work with Microsoft and CitiBank to address a knowledge gap for Careers Advisors in schools through a new program called CAREERx.

One of the happiest times of the year is awarding our annual ABCN scholarships and this year we were delighted to be able to award 15. Our biggest number yet, we are thrilled that it includes our first Tasmanian scholar. It also means we are now proudly supporting a total of 41 ABCN scholars. While it’s still early days for these students, we know they are already on the path to achieving great things – two of our inaugural scholars have been offered early entry places into university and many of our 2014 scholars were awarded leadership positions in their schools.

And last but certainly not least, we’ve spent a good deal of time during the year re-connecting with our student alumni to see the lasting impact our programs have had on their lives years after leaving school. These inspiring young people, who have continued to thrive and succeed, remind us that ABCN’s work is so vitally important.

To mark our 10 year anniversary we’ve been sharing some of our many success stories with you through the year. But as we head off for the holiday break, we hope you enjoy three of our favourites below…and here’s to another decade of achieving great things together.