Fr Bob Maguire Foundation

The Father Bob Maguire Foundation began in 2003 in an attempt to gather all my social investments together under one Board of Governance.

I started Open Family Australia over 27 years ago to address the immediate needs of Melbourne’s “street kids”.

Open Family has since begun operations in Canberra and several other key population centres along the Hume Highway, from Melbourne to Albany.

Open Family had a short but successful tour of Duty in Logan City, Queensland and Adelaide. Meanwhile I became uncomfortable about slow incremental growth in 2004 and suggested exponential growth in 2004 as the theme for that financial year’s strategic plan.

Wiser minds prevailed and I must wait patiently for my preferred option to see the light of day.

I began Emerald Hill Mission in early 1989 to respond to the material poverty of my own, South / Port Melbourne’s neighbourhood public housing tenants.

It has a good Board of governance comprised of local businessmen and -women.

It provides meals for up to seventy people five times a week, provides school cost relief for a dozen public housing children and employs two social workers for outreach work.

The Mission also funds a food van which caters for poor people in two locations close to my parish centre which serves as operational headquarters for the Mission.

In 2003 I founded a third ready response unit, Beyond Care, because a dozen former clients of Open Family had survived the years from troubled adolescence to be faced with a crime and drug free adulthood without personal, family or community support.

We had told street kids that if they joined Open Family’s program of rehabilitation they would be members of Open Family forever.

Beyond Care provides urgent, flexible and ‘classified’ funding for these dozen survivors.

They all began life as wards of state. Beyond Care compensates them for the lack of state support stopped at 18 years of age.

Beyond Care is an unglamorous unit as are all intensive care units. It is, however, my personal vocation in the years left to me.

Schools Without Borders was founded to provide support for a school in India and one in Bali.

We are in discussions with the Department of Foreign Affairs to acquire tax deductibility for donors to these offshore projects. I am confident of the success of this request and you will read about the success of these projects in my ‘Chairman Message’ next year.

Another of our initiatives the Fr Bob Maguire Foundation Scholarship. My Foundation taken it upon itself to arrange further schooling to disadvantaged students at various learning institutions in the Melbourne area. We are providing funding to children with high aspirations but socio-economic handicaps.

Their single mothers are heroes but need help, especially the practical help offered by the Foundation. The scholarship funding given to anyone deserving upon application regardless of creed or religion. Of course the Foundation also cover the cost of the children’s books and uniform whenever it is possible, as well their scholarship.

I am proud to present these projects, these social capital assets to the friends and members of the Father Bob Maguire Foundation as worthy of their investment of money, goods, services and, above all, themselves as shareholders.

Special thanks to a few ’staunch’ allies: Brian and Edwina Watson, Bob Sinclair, Mike Dolbey, Andrew Shannon, Ray Zahra, Robert Lane, Nick Columb who stuck by me and my cause when others had discreetly withdrawn.

The style I used in this report is a bit cheeky - I’ve copied it from a recent Chairman’s Report from globally well known Warren Buffett.

Bob Maguire AM RFD
President
Father Bob Maguire Foundation