National Young Leaders Day 2017

 My favourite speaker on the day was Daniel Flynn because he had a great story. At the age of 19 he had a great idea of how he could help countries in poverty. He talked about children that had to walk miles to get water, often that water was dirty.

He was a very inspiring speaker because he shared his experience of how he made a difference in people’s lives. He started a business with his wife and best friend, creating bottled water. He named his company “Thank you Water”. All the money raised from water being sold went towards the people in places like Timor Leste.

It wasn’t as simple as this though. After making the group he then had to find a factory to bottle the water. This was a hard task because they had no money to buy this factory. When they finally found someone who was willing to lend them the factory he then went to try and convince people to stock their water in Australian supermarkets. They had years of people saying, “We will not stock your water your idea will never work.” After 3 years of this, two major supermarkets decided that they would give their company a chance.

Thankyou water has become very successful in Australia. They have even started up another part of “Thankyou”, selling health foods and soaps. They have launched “a pay what you want book” to help them fund starting “Thankyou” in New Zealand. The book went to Number 1 best seller.

Over the 8 years that Thankyou has been around they have raised and given 4.6 million dollars to countries who don't have clean water or a healthy food supply. 442 thousand people have profited from clean water and sanitation, and 125 thousand people have been given food products.

National Young Leaders Day was an awesome day. One thing from the day that I will remember for a long time and took away from the day, was all the speakers that spoke had a different message to share. It didn't matter where you came from or whether they were a sport's person, or a business person - one of them was even a barber. They all had story to tell and that was really cool to see that no matter what you want to be you can still become a leader. We are all seeds born of greatness.

By:  Max Coltman