ABCN salutes longtime mentor Garth Brightwell after 15 years of volunteering

What a legend! And what a poignant moment as ABCN farewelled Garth Brightwell, who is moving on from Optus in Perth, where he has been a mentor and company champion for 15 years, starting with our programs way back in 2009.

His participation in ABCN was driven by the idea of offering students what he had missed. Garth explained that while he didn’t come from a low socio-economic background, he would have appreciated having a mentor during his school years.

" I like the idea of - I guess for want of a better term, giving back - and really what I think appealed to me was the idea that I would have loved something like that when I was in high school. And I thought that was a really valuable thing to be able to contribute to even in some small way, to a young person's journey.”

Throughout his years of mentoring, Garth says his central message to his mentees has remained constant—there is no singular or linear path and that everyone makes mistakes, “Noone’s perfect. The most important thing is to try and to put yourself out there and have a go.”

When asked what advice he would give to potential ABCN volunteers, Garth acknowledged that the hardest part was simply getting people involved.

"Once they've done the first program, they're hooked," he explained. “It's like they become like a reformed smoker. They can't talk stop talking about how good it is to participate in a program, they understand just how enjoyable it is, how easy it is.”

He said ABCN programs can expose both mentors and mentees to new perspectives. “I think sometimes people in corporate worlds can get stuck in their ways or they can have blinkers on to what's going on in the outside world.

And as much as I put into the program, I think I got so much more out of it"