As an educator, I am very lucky to be witness to some incredible situations where young people demonstrate great courage, resilience and service. At the start of this year during the Christmas holidays, I received the following email from Year 12 student, Alex Macrokanis:

Dear Mr Lafferty

In March is the World’s Greatest Shave and a few years ago the Year 12s of that year had a group of them that shaved their heads at school and raised a considerable amount of money.

I’ve got a group of 12-15 boys, through losing a family member or someone close to them, having a connection to cancer. I know that the World’s Greatest Shave supports Leukemia but all of them including myself are wanting to come together and raise money for a genuine cause. I was wondering if we would be able to make the World’s Greatest Shave happen again at Whitefriars?

With Alex’s passion and the support of College Captains Evan O’Connor, Jordan Goss and Luke Verhoeven, it wasn’t a difficult decision at all to give the boys the green light. Run by the Leukaemia Foundation, World’s Greatest Shave’s mission is to achieve zero lives lost to blood cancer by 2035. Since starting in 1998, the foundation has raised over $290 million to help defeat blood cancer.

It was inspiring to walk with the boys as they put together this significant fundraising event. They created a fundraising page on the World’s Greatest Shave website and set about raising money. The following boys put themselves forward to have their head shaved for this worthy cause: Alex Macrokanis, Luke Verhoeven, Tom Nott, Jobe Rogers, Kane Dickson, Alwyn Nanayakkara, Liam Loverso, Ben Kunz, Adrian Zuccala, Lachlan Manchee, Joey Regan, Zac Schafer and Thomas Williams. Further to this, several other students nominated themselves to be involved in raising funds: Evan O’Connor, Jordan Goss, Sam Kessler and Nathan Freier. The College also cooked 900 sausages raising $1,800 and all funds raised went to the boys and their fundraising total.

The boys raised an incredible $14,263.03. To put this in context, $80 provides the first night of accommodation for a family who have urgently relocated for life-saving treatment with nowhere to stay and $150 means the work of a PhD student is supported for another day as they work towards a cure.

At Whitefriars, one of the Carmelite tenets which is at the core of our school is ‘Service’. There is no doubting the service these young men have provided in fighting this insidious disease and I thank them for showing what can be done in the service of others when you put your mind to it. Also, a special thank you to the staff who supported the boys through the many elements of this fundraising journey.

Mr Mick Lafferty

Deputy Principal – Students