At its latest grant giving ceremony, Newcastle Permanent Charitable Foundation passed a milestone of $25million in grants since being established in 2003.
Twenty-five million dollars. It's an enormous sum of money.
Reflecting on that, I am extremely humbled and grateful - both to those who have come before us at the foundation, and to all our partners: past, present and future.
Looking to the future, I have noticed an increasing number of projects tackling the specific challenges faced by our youth.
The world our young people of today have grown up in presents some truly unique challenges.
We need no reminder of how the COVID-19 pandemic turned our day-to-day lives on their heads for the better part of two years.
Two years is obviously a long time for anyone, but for a person aged 20, two years represents 10 per cent of their whole life to that point - a percentage that only increases the younger a person is.
To have spent a double-figure percentage of your entire time on Earth living with the stress, uncertainty and boredom that were part and parcel of our pandemic existence? It's a lot, in every regard.
Of course, being forced indoors during this time was perhaps something of a blessing, given this one-in-a-hundred-year pandemic came at the same time as a one-in-a-hundred-year flooding event in 2021, followed by a one-in-one-thousand-year flooding event in 2022.
Before these unprecedented rains, the Black Summer of 2019-20 saw our nation devastated by blazes that caused death, destruction and destitution on a truly heartbreaking level.
Fires, floods and a global pandemic. And that was just the last four years.
Broadly speaking, this is the first post-9/11 generation.
Many of us will never forget where we were when we first saw those awful images of the twin towers falling, the stark and chilling realisation that the whole world was forever changed.
Last year marked 20 years since the 2002 bombing in Bali, when this new reality was brought to our doorstep here in Australia. Three years after that, terror found its way to the Hunter, as three people from Newcastle were killed and more than a dozen injured in the 2005 Bali attacks.
These events changed our lives.
Changed our world.
But for our young people, the threat of terror is just part of the world they've grown up in. It doesn't make it any less real or scary, but where many of us remember the way the world shifted, this generation have never known it any other way.
For this generation, the internet has always been omnipresent. It is obviously a wonderful tool that has opened new horizons, but in the wrong hands it can be used as a weapon.
Our young people walk the edge of this two-sided blade every day. They have opportunities we could never have dreamed of, but also navigate nightmares we could not have fathomed, such as cyberbullying, catfishing and ghosting - words that have taken on new, insidious meanings.
I don't bring any of this up with the intention to be condescending. Because the young people of Australia do not have my pity.
They have my admiration. Perhaps most of all in the mental health space.
Not so long ago, the thought of asking for help with mental health was seen as shameful, something to be hidden. This progressed and instead, we started calling those who asked for help 'brave'.
But what I'm increasingly seeing in young people's responses and attitudes to mental health is where we need to be: accepting.
Broadly speaking, this is a generation for whom the discussion around mental health is far more likely to be accepted as normal.
Not shameful. Not even brave. It's just what's done. So it should be no surprise we are seeing far more applications for grants in this space. And not only because people are embracing the need to care for mental health.
But because we are also getting to understand how broad this space is. Being cooped up at home for months on end, seeing your nation on fire or underwater, or interacting with the wrong people online are all ways our mental health can be affected.
What's more, good mental health and wellbeing have broad-reaching consequences as well.
Last year, the World Health Organisation's director-general said, "Investment into mental health is an investment into a better life and future for all."
An investment into a better life and future for all.
It's a nice summary of what Newcastle Permanent Charitable Foundation's $25million in grants have been.
Jennifer Leslie is the chair of Newcastle Permanent Charitable Foundation
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