At 14, Rachel Bonic was working part time to help support her family while attending high school.
The daughter of a concreter and warehouse clerk, Bonic was raised in a single-parent family in working-class Sydney suburb Minto.
Life changed for Bonic when she won a scholarship in 2014 with Australian Business and Community Network (ABCN), a Sydney-based non-profit connecting disadvantaged students to business mentors, broadened her understanding of career opportunities.
‘‘Through the mentor I visited the workplace and set goals,’’ Bonic, now nineteen and a law student, recalls.
‘‘It was like a new world, very exciting and so different to anything I’d seen before. My mentor directed me and showed me things like — this is what a human resources manager does.
‘‘They broke down the barriers in the corporate world and make you realise that you’re no different.’’
Like Bonic, Michael Spiteri grew up in a low socioeconomic family, in Lurnea, NSW.
Spiteri didn’t want to be a labourer like his father but was unsure what he wanted to do.
‘‘I did commerce in year nine. It sparked my interest. I really liked numbers and the finance side of things,’’ he says. Read more
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