There are several ways you can help support our Building Bridges, Not Walls digital project commemorating the military heritage of Kent Street SHS.

Voluntary Assistance – What You Could Do

We’ve already identified more than 1,000 Kent Street alumni or their family members who served in Australia’s military. We expect to find many more as word spreads about our project. That’s why we need as many volunteers as possible to help with research.

Each service member will have a dedicated profile including name, photograph (optional), period of military service details, relevant documents (eg links to National Archives of Australia files or PDF biographies), and summary of their connection to Kent Street SHS.

Society members will be able to help on a voluntary basis to:

• Identify a veteran and create a file for that person;

• Research primary sources (eg NVA records) for information about their military service;

• Research secondary sources (eg finding and transcribing Trove newspaper articles, sourcing or taking photographs, summarising books and local history documents) for information about their lives;

• Collect stories from oral histories or interviews with family members where possible;

• Compile information into a suitable format for the person’s profile; and

• Send the completed file to the web master to be uploaded onto our website.

If you have information on a veteran who should be listed, photos or any other memorabilia you have which is relevant to this project, or you would like an opportunity to support this important recording of our local history before it is lost, please contact us.

Why not email us (society@kentians.org.au) if you’re interested in any of the roles outlined above or want to know more about our project to honour veterans’ service?

Funding – What You Could Do

Unlike big museums, we don’t have permanent investment funds to cover daily operations that government grants won’t fund. We rely entirely on donors, sponsors and fundraising to maintain our collections, meet essential costs, and recruit and train new volunteer staff.

While volunteers aren’t paid, their time has a significant economic value. to put it simply, and based on the replacement cost for a typical volunteer:

Just $300 would allow us to fully fund the research of each veteran’s story and have it uploaded to our virtual memorial within 3 weeks.

Smaller donation amounts can also help and, as we engage more volunteers and more funding has been sourced, we’ll be able to add more and more profile pages of veterans to our website.

And don’t forget, as an approved Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR), most donations to the Kentian Society (Inc) can now be claimed as tax deductions.

Financial donations are always very welcome, as they help fund major museum projects like this to ensure the history of Kent Street SHS is protected and accessible for current and future generations.