MaD team help out with top-quality backpacks

Making a Difference - Brisbane
Inspiring. Passionate. Bold

Katherine Hoyle and her mother, Denise, started Making a Difference – Brisbane after the 2011 floods.

Better known as The MaD Team, they and their group of volunteers have become an integral part of the local support network and their main role is to distribute backpacks with essential items to vulnerable people.

“I have been influenced by my mother since I was a child to pay it forward,” says Katherine. “Whether it was a school fete, local charity or church group, mum would encourage me to volunteer.”

She and her mum run the non-profit operation from their home in Manly West.

They raise funds to buy the high-quality backpacks and have collection points throughout Brisbane for toiletries, food and other essential items.

“I am passionate about our MaD Team,” says Katherine. “Our motto is giving a hand up - not a hand out.”

She is delighted by the community recognition of being voted a Westfield Local Hero, but her main focus is to stay grounded and continue working for the community.

The MaD team regularly attend street feeds to hand out the backpacks and the other items.

Over the years, they have also distributed more than six hundred backpacks to school children and more than a thousand pairs of pyjamas to children in foster care.

It’s not only locals who benefit. They have sent fifty large boxes of shoes, clothing, school supplies, toiletries and T-shirts to Fiji and twenty boxes of clothing to an Indigenous community in Katherine in the Northern Territory.

Thanks to their large following on social media and collection points all over Brisbane, they are able to collect a large number of items in a small amount of time.

Westfield Local Heroes are nominated and voted for by their communities, with the three top finalists per Westfield centre each awarded a $10,000 grant for their affiliated organisation.

Making a Difference – Brisbane will use the grant to buy and make up more than a thousand backpacks.

“The backpacks have to be high quality to deal with various weather conditions. We want people to take pride in them,” says Katherine.

__For further information on the Westfield Local Heroes program, click here. __