As I've been catching up 1:1 with some of our beautiful Pledge 1% members, I've been mentioning how the Atlassian Foundation developed our Theory of Change for our work in education.
Here I wanted to share the document with you - so you can see the journey we've taken.
The Atlassian Foundation's education journey started around 13 years ago when our Founders Mike and Scott met Room to Read's Founder John Wood. I believe they met in a pub for a "Beers for Books" fundraiser. From that meeting, the Atlassians decided they wanted to donate to Room to Read, and the Starter License program was born.
Around that time, I was working for The Smith Family, one of Australia's largest charities that believed that education was the key to breaking the poverty cycle. I too believe that to be true, I have never doubted it.
When I started at Atlassian in 2012, I formed the Foundation Council - a group of passionate Atlassians from our three offices - Sydney, Amsterdam and San Francisco. Together we decided to survey the 250 Atlassians as to what cause should be our main focus area. Education, Youth and Disadvantage came out on top. Today, they are still our main areas of focus for our major granting program.
Over the course of the last few years, we worked with the beautiful Mary from the Centre for Evidence & Implementation to refine our strategy, particularly our Theory of Change. Mary and the wonderful Belinda Parker helped us produce the attached document.
From pub fundraisers, to Theory of Change, it's been quite the journey. I wanted to share the attached with our Pledge 1% community so you could see where we're up to. In many ways we're just getting started!
