Supported Or Supplicated? Schools Supporting Student Efforts in Their Community

Thomas Maguire-Nguyen & Garv Shah

pervocemvita.org, 2cousins.org

In this article, two passionate student voice advocates—Thomas, a current Year 12 student and founder of Per Vocem Vita, and Garv, founder of 2cousins, a global volunteer initiative — share insights into two key questions:

a)       How do youth-led community-based initiatives relate to participants’ education?

b)       How can and should schools support and enable such initiatives?

We’re both involved in such initiatives, so we want to tell you about them, and also reflect on what we’ve learnt.

Thomas

I’m Thomas, currently a Year 12 students at a Catholic boys’ school in south-east Melbourne. I founded Per Vocem Vita in 2022 as a youth-run and youth-led organisation that offers public speaking and debating incursions to primary schools. All of these workshops are run by energised young people from the ages of 14 to 21 years. 

Garv

I’m Garv, a passionate advocate for student voice, education reform, and the power of technology to create social change. As the founder of 2cousins, a global volunteer initiative under my non-profit Aporia, I’m currently leading 18 international volunteers to teach over 200 underprivileged students weekly and have raised about $6000 for rural development. My advocacy extends to my work with VicSRC and the National Student Voice Council, where I’ve contributed to national discussions on student leadership and policy reform.

Exploring the Two Initiatives in Detail

Thomas

Since its foundation in 2022, Per Vocem Vita has been active in supporting adolescents and teenagers on their public speaking, leadership, and self-improvement journeys.

We formalised from the first event, adopting the name ‘Per Vocem Vita’ (Meaning life through speech), and starting to expand to different schools in our local area, as well as setting up a formal volunteer induction process. Since that time, the organisation has grown steadily. In 2022 we taught 50 students with 10 volunteers at one school; in 2023 it was 200 students with 40 volunteers at three schools; and in 2024 it was over 600 students with 80 volunteers at five different schools across Melbourne’s Southeast.

Per Vocem Vita’s volunteer demographics are primarily made up of high school students, mostly aged 16 to 18 years, from a diverse range of socio-economic backgrounds, sexualities, and cultures. Whilst we do have a small number of post-secondary school volunteers, the majority are in high school and represent more than a dozen schools from across Melbourne. We are constantly expanding our volunteer base and building grassroots, community connections. As part of these grassroot links, we decided we would also form connections with local secondary schools, to supplement the number of primary school students that we could teach throughout the year, as well as to bolster recruitment of secondary school students as volunteers.

Garv

2cousins is a global volunteer initiative to teach underprivileged students in other countries, using modern technology. 2cousins offers a vibrant tutoring program, allowing volunteers from Australia and the US to use online conferencing software to be paired with an organisation overseas and offer personalised classes and tutoring to underprivileged students. This program allows students overseas to receive an enhanced education by working with Australian and American volunteers, whilst also building the volunteering hours of those doing the teaching. 

It hasn’t all be plain sailing. At every step along the way, there were more issues obstructing my goal of helping my friends in the long-term. A lack of devices or Wi-Fi led me to collaborate with companies like EnterPi and Telstra to repurpose discarded computers, setting up digital learning spaces in communities similar to mine. Still, power failures made synchronous lessons inconsistent, so I tried to design an app so the students could learn whenever they wanted through quizzes, leaderboards, and gamified lessons!

Many times, my ‘solutions’ failed to help too. I thought it’d be wonderful to implement in-app messaging for homework support between classes, so I spent months programming, only to find out that they’d already started learning to use WhatsApp, rendering my ‘solution’ redundant and overengineered. Many of my assumptions about how English should be taught turned out to be completely unproductive, and a lot of the app had to be redesigned to cater for people who had never used phones before.

Reasons for Involvement

Thomas

Originally, the organisation began as a fun gathering of friends, when we offered just one public speaking workshop to my old primary school, which could not provide the public speaking program that it had when I was there. When I was back in primary school, the public speaking program was hugely important to me – it was a major part of my formation as a young person. The service, previously offered by a local parishioner over multiple weeks, gave me confidence to grow as a person, as well as drove an interest in politics, debate, and oration. many of my friends also experienced this type of horizon broadening, and so I was determined to share this with my community. What started at my former school quickly ballooned, as we found that not only did the students enjoy and learn from the sessions, but our volunteers found it fun, enriching, and an overall enjoyable experience.

Garv

When I was younger, I used to routinely visit my hometown Hyderabad and, as kids do, I became friends with any kid I met. Every time we’d visit, you could find me playing cricket at the orphanage next to my dad’s childhood home, and despite barely being able to communicate, we all grew up together. Only when I grew older did I realise that my friends and I had very different life trajectories. They were only taught to cook, clean, and operate machinery for the local factory, and I was beginning to realise that the lucky life that I lived was much rarer than I once thought. As such, daily cricket began to evolve into mutual teaching and learning – the precursor to the 2cousins program!

My proudest achievement is that we’ve already been able to help two students get into their local universities, and beyond any other numbers, it makes me extremely happy that they have the option to pursue their dreams.

Workshops are run by energised young people (Source: Supplied)

School Support

Thomas

My school has been able to support Per Vocem Vita in a variety of ways. The first was to focus on involvement as the results of a partnership. Although this may seem a minor change, framing the organisation and the school as being in a partnership, fosters unity, equality, and shared decision making. It says to the school and the wider community that any outcomes achieved are the result of the school and Per Vocem Vita are working together, rather than the organisation serving the college.

Together, Per Vocem Vita and the school then offered a workshop to primary school students from the College’s catchment area, enabling primary school students to learn about public speaking and also experience a slice of secondary school. It also allowed the school to build its brand and image in the community.

Primary school students were dropped at the school via charter bus in the morning, they were given a booklet and were then provided with workshops and the opportunity to debate throughout the day. All of this was delivered by the debating students from the college in one of the college’s event rooms. So that our volunteers did not need to miss any school, the workshops were operated in December after secondary school ends for the year. The workshops were run independently of volunteers’ secondary school education.

Garv

My school has played a significant role in enabling my work to be possible. The most impactful has been the wonderful launchpad that is our student community. The whole concept of 2cousins started from the idea of helping connect my Australian classmates to those who receive no formal education.

Without the passion and enthusiasm of the students around me volunteering their time, none of this would be possible. My school helped foster a welcoming platform, disseminating announcements and updates, along with organising many of the fundraising efforts in the form of casual clothes days. I feel extremely privileged to be in a community that has warmly embraced all of my efforts, showing me that student-driven initiatives aren’t just possible – they’re highly valued.

School Challenges

Thomas

A key part of student voice is partnership, unity, and collaboration. An effort that is purely made by students can be seen as being done in spite of an oft-feeling supplicatory place in education. Conversely, a school that dominates and drives the supposed ‘student voice’ initiatives, can also highlight a lack of real agency possessed by students at that institution. It is, therefore, as in so many other contexts, the job of educators and students to find the ‘goldilocks sone’. There is no simple flowchart to follow; rather the only way to find the comfortable middle ground is by dialogue and by balancing the considerations of students, educators, parents, and other relevant stakeholders. This partnership can be used as a microcosm to witness successes and opportunities for improvement.

Garv

While my school has supported my community involvement in many ways, there were also challenges that made participation more difficult. As supportive as my school was, every decision was surrounded by plenty of ‘red tape’. This was doubly true for any projects involving the school community. Such barriers included having to register as an official charity for any collaboration to be considered.

At the school level, many times, initiatives or projects were suggested by students, with initial replies highly enthusiastic. However, unfortunately often this was followed by months of “we’ll look into it” - promised conversations would be forever postponed and often faded with time.

Additionally, while student leadership was encouraged, decision-making power was undoubtedly still concentrated with adults in spaces where students were not welcome. This had the effect of perhaps unintentionally blocking students out of their own initiatives, with all decisions - past the initial ideas - being held behind closed doors without student participation.

In my work with VicSRC, I saw how impactful it can be when students are directly involved in shaping policies that affect them, but within school structures, there were still major limitations on how much influence students have for any meaningful change within school communities.

Possibilities

Thomas

This partnership from Per Vocem Vita and my school has resulted in several reflections on how schools can enable student voice by embracing the work of students outside of school.

We can point to many positives in this initiative. When the workshops occur, it is students who take the lead. Whilst teachers are there, with a reassuring presence in the room to assure behavioural and child safety standards are met, it is the student volunteers who get to be ‘heroes’ of the day, as they confidently deliver the curriculum that they have constructed. It is positive to see that it is the students who volunteer themselves – not being ‘volunteered’ by a teacher. Moreover, crafting the curriculum and the structure of the day are both positive steps forward. Putting student volunteers in the driver’s seat and enabling them to have control of the process, means they are more knowledgeable about the curriculum they are teaching, as well as forming a personal connection with their curriculum content.

However, the process can still be improved. Students can take a more active role in deciding other important details surrounding an event. Why does the classroom have to have circular tables and chairs? Might the primary schoolers learn best if they could instead sit on the floor or use beanbags? Why should we use a PowerPoint and a booklet (based on our own prior experiences)? What if we could instead learn outside, and adopt a more physically active form of education, even for a concept like public speaking? This type of out-of-the-box thinking, allows student leaders to express their voice by experimenting with educational methods that defy educational norms and embrace new ways to deliver content.

Garv

I strongly believe my school and all of the adults involved are ready and willing to take children’s views into account, but decision-making processes consistently seem too rigid to enable this beyond consultation at the very start and end of initiatives. I wish that all schools, whether government or independent, would have a policy requirement that children must be involved in decision-making processes, and that the entire process would be transformed to emphasise transparency.

Students involved in leadership positions don’t need to be there just to improve ‘school culture’. They can and, in my opinion, should be involved in finances and resource allocation, curriculum development and organisational goals, policy and external engagement, and everything else that governs how a school functions. Better yet, I believe the pinnacle of student voice is the scenario where it is a policy requirement that children and adults share power and responsibility for all decisions that are made, in a system that truly incorporates student voice from the beginning to the end.

Learnings

Thomas

When it comes to student voice, it’s important to break down situations to their most basic assumptions and allow students to help rebuild the context in which their education resides. It’s worth remembering: if a student’s voice is put forward, but nobody hears it, was there really any student voice in the first place?

Garv

My participation in 2cousins, student advocacy, and community initiatives has fundamentally shaped how I view leadership, education, and impact. I’ve learned that real change doesn’t come from having answers—it starts with listening.

(Source: Supplied)

What baffled me was that, even as someone highly involved in ‘student voice,’ my first thought wasn’t to simply ask my students what they needed. 2cousins has taught me about the diversity of thought and experience I rarely learn from outside my social-bubble, and with time, I’ve learnt to constantly remind myself that the first step to helping anyone is asking them their needs before assuming. This takeaway has shaped much of what I do, from grassroots teaching to national student voice advocacy, ensuring that education isn’t just accessible but also student-driven.

I’ve also learned that young people don’t have to wait to make a difference. Too often, students are told that real change is reserved for adults in positions of authority, but my experiences have shown me otherwise. It starts with trust and ends with policy, and I hope that all schools will work towards a future of meaningful student-voice.