A vision for change

Rosie O'Halloran is recognised with the 2014 Audi Style Scholarship.

Inspired by a fleeting image on television, Rosie O’Halloran has embarked on a journey she never could have dreamed of. At this year’s Women of Style awards, the coveted InStyle and Audi Style Scholarship was awarded to this extraordinary humanitarian who at just 28, is making a tangible difference on the world stage.

10 June, 2014

Life change

A glimpse of green on a television screen changed Rosie O’Halloran’s life course.

“I was sitting in front of the TV one night and as I was flicking between channels I saw a flash of green hills,” says Rosie who, at that point in 2008, was halfway through a construction degree and working on a building site.

“It was a landscape of rolling green hills and physically I got butterflies – in that moment, I decided wherever those hills were, I was going to go. I’ve never had that reaction before to a landscape – there was real pull there.”

Not knowing where those hills were, she rang the TV station. “A lady got back to me and told me it was a village in south-west Uganda so I thought, ‘I guess I’m going to Uganda then’,” says Rosie.

Several months later, Rosie was in the village volunteering at the primary school and spending time with families. She came back to Sydney, decided to hang up her steel-capped boots for good and set up the not-for-profit organisation foundations.(au). In late 2009, she returned to Uganda with her focus firmly set on helping children.

“I came across a number of kids who didn’t have a home or an immediate family to look after them,” she says. “I found a little heap under a blanket on a mat and it turned out to be a little girl called Sarah – she had malaria and no one was able to pay for her to have medical treatment so she had effectively been left to die.”

As Sarah was treated, authorities asked if Rosie’s organisation could look after her. Rosie promptly rented a house in the town of Kabale. “We set up a children’s home in a weekend,” she says. “Sarah, along with other children I’d met who were in a similar position to her, started living in the home and they’re all still there – they’re in school and we’ve still got the same staff we hired that first weekend.”

“It was a landscape of rolling green hills and physically I got butterflies – in that moment, I decided wherever those hills were, I was going to go."

Rosie O'Halloran & Andrew Doyle, Audi Australia Managing Director

That no-nonsense, can-do attitude has helped the 28-year-old progress her charity’s work with children’s education and health across the Kabale region.

Unstoppable attitude

That no-nonsense, can-do attitude has helped the 28-year-old progress her charity’s work with children’s education and health across the Kabale region. These days, nine children live at the home, named Our Place, and the charity supports another 21 kids outside the home. “We’ve been able to get a number of kids back with extended family members, which was always our long-term plan,” Rosie says.

Another Ugandan girl inspired Rosie’s latest venture: the Institute for Global Women Leaders (IGWL). On Rosie’s first trip to Uganda, she became friends with Abbias and later helped pay for her high school education. Several years ago, Abbias fell ill and went to Kampala for treatment. “The doctor basically looked across at her and said she was just a girl from a village and she didn’t matter,” says Rosie. “They went home and several weeks later Abbias passed away.

“That moment deeply affected me. I decided to look at the global attitudes towards women and girls, and I was quite horrified at what I discovered. That lit a fire in me.” And even though her charity work brought joy as she watched the kids thrive, Rosie’s African experiences were taking a toll. “I was becoming increasingly exhausted – I was coming and going between Australia and Uganda quite frequently,” Rosie says.

She looked around for programs that supported young women and leading social-change organisations that could help develop her leadership skills – but found nothing specific to women. “I feel that women, particularly of that age group, face some unique challenges,” she says.

IGWL, which Rosie co-founded earlier this year [2014] with her friend Rachel Kelly, is launching two programs to fill that gap. Changemakers Accelerator aims to bring together women changemakers aged 25 to 35 at regional and global summits for specialised leadership training.

Heartworks, which will launch next year, will help women aged 18 to 26 to unleash their inner social warrior with journeys of self-discovery. The participants will spend time volunteering with organisations in Bali that help women and girls who have been rescued from sexual slavery. “We did a lot of survey work to help develop this program and found that girls around school-leaving age are looking for alternatives to ‘schoolies’,” says Rosie. “We wanted to offer a stream of this program for school-leavers as a group.”

Making a difference

Before being announced as the winner of the $10,000 InStyle and Audi Style Scholarship, Rosie vowed that if she won, she’d use the money to speak to 5,000 senior high school students nationwide about IGWL’s initiatives and non-traditional career paths. She’s already some way towards that goal, speaking to students at her former school, Sydney’s MLC School.

She set herself that specific number of listeners to help beat a long-held fear of public speaking. “At times when I did have to speak, I would completely freeze and just thought I would die on the stage – I was just absolutely terrified,” she says. “I thought I would set myself that challenge because it was about time that I was no longer limited by that fear.” Over the years, she’s used hypnotherapy and read piles of self-help books about public speaking to help overcome her nerves.

What she’s mostly learned about public speaking is that “it’s really just a matter of being comfortable with yourself and speaking from the heart. When you’ve got those two things, the fear subsides and you almost have a sense of freedom,” she says.

Indeed it is that very freedom she seeks for women and girls that has driven her not only to conquer her own fear but to allow others to do the same.

What she’s mostly learned about public speaking is that “it’s really just a matter of being comfortable with yourself and speaking from the heart.

A vision for change

Rosie O'Halloran is recognised with the 2014 Audi Style Scholarship.

Life change

Unstoppable attitude

Making a difference

Simply electric

What’s in a name

Space ships

Living history