August 2022
Piper was honoured to be invited to the 2022 National Water Safety Summit held at the International Convention Centre in Sydney as a keynote speaker. Piper spoke in two of the sessions about Swimming & Water Safety Skills & also the Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Communities session.
July 2022
We kicked off NAIDOC week at the NSW Country Championships. Piper said the Acknowledgment to Country & then spent the next two days as an offical. Along with 14 other Indigenous kids Piper and her brother Lane swam in NAIDOC relays. Teams were named after water animals and derived from the Dharug Language - the traditional language of the Wann-gal People, on whose land competition took place. It was great to see NAIDOC week reconised at the event.
2022
With COVID things slowed down a bit for Bambigi, but we kept going. We have already supported over 300 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids learn to swim or learn about water safety and we look forward to doing more in 2022.
April 2019
New Partnerships -Earlier this year we announced Bambigi received a grant from the NSW Government’s Water Safety Fund. We will be using this funding to get the Tirkandi Inaburra boys into water safety classes and the Wiradjuri Aboriginal Pre-school kids into swimming lessons. We are super excited to be partnering with these Aboriginal organisations.
October 2018
We smashed our goal - With some help from Swimming NSW we currently have 21 kids enrolled in lessons, some for their second term. When Piper started Bambigi she hoped to get 20 kids into lessons this year. Well we got 36 through at least one term!!! We are so proud of the progress all the kids have made with their swimming and we look forward to doing more in 2019.
April 2018
A Bambigi kid made it to the NSW State Swimming Championship!!! Shamia had never had a formal swimming lesson or entered a swimming competition before she joined Bambigi in 2018. The lessons gave her the confidence to enter her schools swimming competition for the first time. She did so well in freestyle she was picked in her school's junior relay team and they came first at the Zone Swimming Carnival! She kept up with the lessons and a few weeks later they won again at the Regional Swimming competition in Albury. The team went onto the State Swimming championship, giving Shamia the chance to swim at Homebush Olympic Pool. The team place 26th in the State. Piper worked for years to get to the State Champions and Shamia made it after her first try. Well done, we are so proud. It was great to have more Aboriginal kids swimming at the level!
February 2019
Bambigi and the Water Safety Fund - We have some exciting news. Bambigi has been awarded a $21,600 grant from the NSW Government's Water Safety Fund Community Grants Program! Piper got the chance to meet Austin Evans MP to announce the grant. We will use this money to expand into other towns and we are hoping to develop some new partnerships with local Aboriginal organisations. So stay tuned to see what we do next.