Australian Indigenous Education Foundation
Organization Details
AIEF was established in 2008 in response to community demand from Indigenous families who choose to enrol their children in boarding schools.
Bringing together the government and private sector, AIEF provides scholarship funding for Indigenous students to complete Year 12 or tertiary studies, with career support to help them make a successful transition to employment.
Backed by some of Australia’s most influential business and community leaders, AIEF has grown from one scholarship student in 2008 to now supporting over 1,000 young Indigenous people from over 400 communities in every state and territory of Australia.
Impact Story
The rationale for AIEF's existence is to empower Indigenous families to make key decisions affecting their own family, including how and where their children are educated. AIEF does not advocate that any Indigenous child goes to boarding school, nor does AIEF promote boarding school as the best educational option.
Consistent with the principle of self-determination, AIEF responds to selfgenerated demand from Indigenous families and provides co-funding for those families who choose a school themselves, initiate the enrolment application process and financially contribute to the school fees. Most boarding schools in Australia with Indigenous education programs have been engaged in this field for many years before AIEF was established. The issue that AIEF sought to address when established, after being approached by boarding schools to help with scholarship funding for their existing Indigenous education programs, was to support schools to increase the number of Indigenous boarders to help address scholarship demand from Indigenous families. These boarding schools identified that expansion was constrained, and a scholarship provider was critical for growing their programs due to difficulty accessing external funds to pay for their Indigenous education programs and the financial costs already being absorbed internally.
Since AIEF was established, it has provided scholarship funding to enable Partner Schools to respond to the increasing demand from Indigenous families and increase Indigenous boarders at their schools. AIEF has two roles – one in education and one in employment – and in both of these areas, AIEF has enabling functions as follows:
• Education: Provision of scholarship funding to enable students to complete their studies (the AIEF Scholarship Program).
• Employment: Provision of career support to scholarship students and alumni to enable them to achieve employment outcomes after they complete their studies (the AIEF Pathways Program).
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