The UnLtd Adland Bail Out has raised an incredible $140,000 for Whitelion, which will help young homeless and disadvantaged people rebuild their lives.
The fundraising effort was led by the Media Gang, which raised $51,000, while the three biggest fundraisers were Seven West Media’s Kurt Burnette, News Corp’s Lou Barrett and Spark Foundry’s Sue Squillace.
But there were plenty of notable contributions from others that helped this even smash all previous fundraising records for a Bail Out event.
Around 70 senior adland leaders spent a night at the Yasmar Juvenile Detention Centre to learn about the plight of homeless people and the remarkable support services that help them. Check out photos from the event in our image gallery below, including Facebook's Will Easton and GroupM's Mark Lollback in a chicken dance off.
Check out: AdNews news editor Arvind Hickman's take on the event.
Although the fundraising is important, what is more meaningful is that several industry leaders have enquired about how they can support some of the charities that help young homeless people get jobs through Roger Antochi’s Talent Rise.
“The raising money is great, but my highlight was getting such a large group on influential people form a diverse group of organisations to really feel the power of what Whitelion do and connect that to what we do,” UnLtd CEO Chris Freel told AdNews.
“I feel like that has really kickstarted senior people to get it. We’ve been in operation for nearly 12 years and while we have done some amazing things, I feel like we’ve been scratching around the surface. The follow-on and feedback has been great.
“It’s about what we do next – let’s tackle homelessness or let’s tackle youth detention as an issue collectively.”
AdNews understands several industry leaders who attended Bail Out want to get involved in helping young homeless people find work.
“There’s probably about four or five who have said ‘we’ve got jobs and we’re really keen to get involved with you there’,” Freel added.
“There’s been loads of people saying, ‘let’s buy the Whitelion coffee’ and there are people who really want to tackle an issue, including Will Easton (Facebook CEO) and Kurt at Seven.”
The next step for UnLtd is trying to work out which issue specifically the industry will tackle by creating a taskforce to chart a course of action.
“Whilst continuing to the day job in the background, such as the corporate partnerships we have with numerous organisations and the media inventory that funds us, I’m so keen to tackle a big issue on a big scale,” Freel said.
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