AIME’s mission is to lift students here and around the world

The Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience has become a global movement bent on improving the lot of the marginalised.

Drew Paten is a Gunai/Kurnai man from Gippsland, Victoria, and co-CEO of AIME. Aaron Francis/The Australian

Drew Paten vividly remembers reluctantly leaving his Year 8 classroom at Melbourne’s Hampton Park Secondary College to meet Olympic hurdler Kyle Vander-Kuyp for the first time.

“We sat in the front office and he just wanted to know about me and my story and my ambitions,” Paten says.

“As a young Aboriginal man, I was set back a little bit. This really cool human and Olympic star wanted to sit with me.”

Vander-Kuyp, also an Indigenous man, was working with the then six-year-old Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience, offering his support to students in an effort to help them through school and into higher education.

He was the first of several mentors who set Paten on the path to realising his potential, in education and in life.

Now 24, Paten is a co-founder of start-up Talwali Coffee Roasters and is completing a year as co-chief executive of AIME, part of an initiative that requires top managers in companies to select young, diverse employees to shadow them in those senior roles.

Under the guidance of founder and head of design Jack Manning Bancroft, AIME has itself evolved from a national movement for Indigenous students to an international one for all those who are marginalised.

A Gunai and Kurnai man from Gippsland in Victoria, Paten has worked at least part time at AIME since he became the first Aboriginal student at his high school to complete the VCE.

He also was studying for an advanced diploma in engineering at RMIT University when he realised that he wanted to concentrate full time on AIME.

By then he was a mentor leader with the organisation, “trying to instil these different values and break down the stereotypes and barriers that stymie these young Aboriginal kids … just trying to prove to them that (they) are more than capable of anything if they put their minds to it.

“And then I wanted more work in this space – I still don’t know how to explain it, but it really pulls you in and it makes you want to do more.”

AIME, which is part-funded by the federal government, estimates that it has mentored 25,000 young Indigenous Australians since its inception, involving more than 10,000 mentors.

It began its international work in 2016, reaching out through well-established networks and social media to offer “golden tickets” to a limited number of overseas groups that might be interested in adapting the model for their situations.

This included bringing them to Australia for education in AIME’s methods.

Uganda, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa and the US were among the countries that began their own programs.

Then, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit last year, and the face-to-face mentoring on which the organisation was built was suspended, it was time for a game changer.

With the help of partners Salesforce, PwC and its Indigenous consulting arm, it set up IMAGI-NATION{University} for all-comers. This is aimed at making good use of the enforced move to virtual learning to build a much bigger global constituency. In its first year almost 500 students from 52 countries became involved.

The “university” is for people of all ages: as examples, it is enlisting university and college students to lead AIME chapters on their campuses, and school teachers can use its curriculum in their classroom.