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“Sadly, in New Zealand [one of] the best predictors of student outcomes in education is poverty.”
For more than 25 years, local NGO First Foundation has been helping ensure motivated, capable New Zealand students get the opportunity to go to university and create a strong foundation for their future – and their socio-economic status does not hold them back.
A critical driver for the success of the First Foundation programme is that along with financial support to help pay for university fees, each scholar is connected with mentors and paid work experience opportunities.
“Our four-year programme helps talented New Zealanders navigate from school, through higher education and into a meaningful career,” says First Foundation CEO Kirk Sargent. “This dramatically improves each student’s opportunities in life, giving them the support and professional networks many of us take for granted.”
Datacom is a scholarship partner to First Foundation and is currently providing work experience opportunities for some of the programme’s talented scholars including Arno Stil (Pōneke Wellington), Brady Wilson (Ngai Tahu, Ōtautahi Christchurch), Emily Roxburgh (Papatoetoe), Deago Tataurangi (Rangitane, Papatoetoe), Ryley Gray (Tainui, Tākawira Dargaville), and Grace Fa’ave (Māngere) and Taranaki Te Hauora (Porirua).
Behind the scenes, Datacom is playing another important role by helping First Foundation find and implement the right technology to grow their impact.
In a fitting full-circle moment, one of the Datacom team members helping First Foundation implement their Salesforce CRM platform and get valuable insights from their data is Timoti Wharewaka (Ngāti Hine, Ngāti Kahu, Te Aupōuri), a former First Foundation scholar and graduate who is now a programme mentor.
With the breadth of data and stakeholders that organisations need to manage, Timoti says having a complete holistic view of all the data is really important.
“The thing that’s really important to me is that the team is not waking up at 3am in the morning thinking about what it is that they need to do tomorrow, what they need to do next month, it is all there with the Salesforce platform integrated into our database,” says Kirk Sargent.
“We’ve got some really aggressive growth targets as an organisation and we recognised for us to really meet the needs of New Zealand, and of our scholars and partners, we needed a technology partner that could deliver at the speed and scale we needed for our future.”
