‘Today our youth face a range of extraordinary challenges, including the impacts of a global pandemic, plus bushfire and drought ravaged environments. Now is the time for effective prevention measures, which protect and ensure the mental wellbeing of our youth for their futures. In these uncertain times, hope for the future is the key to sustaining our young people and Stand Tall delivers that hope.’ Jeanine and Angela – Stand Tall Co-founders’
The Stand Tall event was founded in 2012 by Jeanine Treharne, Angela Farr-Jones and Roslyn Hills in response to the tragic level of drug use, depression, bullying, hopelessness and self-harm among high school students. They are mums who had the desire to see change in the next generation by providing young students with hope for their future. Jeanine and Angela set about creating a unique one-day TEDx style event which has the ability to get cut-though with teenagers and change their mind sets - and ultimately the course of their lives.
From humble beginnings in 2013 where 1,200 secondary students sat in a school hall to hear inspiring stories of hope from a diversity of speakers, the success of this first event triggered a new way of providing effective wellbeing lessons to secondary students. Stand Tall has now become the largest youth event of it’s kind in Australia, experiencing exponential growth over the last eight years. Student cohorts, from a range of schools (generally years 8 to 11), gather in the massive ICC Sydney theatre to hear messages of hope from speakers who have either faced major adversities, or set themselves incredible goals and have then gone on to lead amazing lives.
Click here to learn more about our history.
Through these events we arm youth with the skills of resilience, the strength to stand up to bullying, the keys to motivation, the power of perspective, plus the benefits of making good and wise decisions.
Working with educators, Stand Tall addresses national high school curriculum outcomes for PDHPE by gathering world class athletes, popular musicians, and inspirational speakers, who all share their life experiences in a relevant and relatable way to Australian teenagers. One massive day of positive input into a young Australian can change a life.
In 2020, the plans were in place to seat 10,000 secondary students at a live event at the ICC Sydney. Covid-19 restrictions quickly curbed those plans; however, the opportunity arose to take the event online and it was live-streamed to over 38,000 students across Australia on June 4.
Now with national reach, and the potential to impact the lives of all teenagers across the nation, the online Stand Tall event will co-exist with future live events. The aim is to reach over 200,000 national students in 2021 at a time when this next generation is faced with unprecedented and extraordinary challenges. We can reach all of them – from the most vulnerable, to the ones who are not yet vulnerable, but may be in the future.