In 2005 an inspired young man, Jack Manning Bancroft, founded AIME (Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience) to find a solution to Indigenous inequality in Australia. On the AIME website they describe the wonderful and growing initiative like this:

“AIME is an Imagination Factory that since 2005, has been creating pop-up Imagination Factories on university campuses around the world to unlock the internal narrative of marginalised kids, taking them from a world that tells them they can’t to a world that tells them they can. Kids who experience the Imagination Factory have gone on to achieve educational parity, rise up as entrepreneurs, and take on a whole new mindset that prepares them for success.

What inspires our Imagination Factory are the mentors throughout human history, the philosophers, artists, inventors and designers who have moved humanity forward in positive ways. With the force of imagination, mentoring and unlikely alliances between those with power and those without, AIME is creating a fairer world.”

The University of New England came on board the AIME project in 2016, with all 116 participants in the inaugural program progressing to the next grade level at school. In 2019 the Oorala Aboriginal Centre at UNE welcomed 230 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander high school students to campus between their experience days, AIME program and open days.

Not willing to sit still while COVID-19 rocked our social and educational worlds, in March 2020 AIME launched its own weekday TV station: IMAGI-NATION {TV}, to bring mentors into kids lives at home; to make sense of today and imagine tomorrow. Impressive high school students co-host the episodes to talk about our future, COVID19 restrictions, kindness, empathy, connection and much much more. They interview leaders in their field and offer snippets of wisdom from so many different aspects of life.

UNE Discovery’s Program Leader Dr Kirsti Abbott was invited to be an IMAGI-NATION {TV} wizard for three minutes! You can see her Three Minutes of Wizardry HERE!

Stay tuned for much more with the AIME initiative in the future of UNE Discovery.