The bright side: Investment in a dream changes 40 lives

Amanda Iakopo reads with Scott Gilmour, who is paying for her education. Picture / Richard Robinson

A businessman who invested a small fortune in a class of 9-year-olds he had never met has been richly rewarded by their progress.

Last year IT entrepreneur Scott Gilmour took responsibility for the long-term education of 40 mainly immigrant children from low-income Auckland families.

Under the I Have a Dream project - the first outside the United States - he will help them through school and pay for their education if they reach tertiary study.

One year into the 15-year project, his "dreamers" are showing improved school attendance and confidence, and are even making gains in reading and maths.

Mr Gilmour finds it difficult to put into words what he has got out of his personal investment.

"It's heaps," he says with alaugh.

"To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'No man can sincerely try to help another without thereby helping himself'."

The children he sponsors are a Year 4 class from decile-one Wesley Primary School in Mt Roskill - an almost entirely immigrant group of 40 from Tonga, Samoa, the Cook Islands, Fiji and Ethiopia.

After one year, attendance levels are higher for 84 per cent of the children, 25 per cent more students see themselves as confident and more of the class are reading at or above their age.

Nine-year-old Amanda Iakopo is one of the dreamers and her father, Mark, says the programme has resulted in major changes not only to his daughter, but to the family's outlook on life.

"When Amanda first started, her reading was not all that sharp, and all of a sudden I see her changing. Now she says, 'Dad, come on I want to read this book.'

"What Amanda is learning she's sharing with my younger daughter, and the way I see them, how they react to what she is saying or reading, they pick it up."

The first year of the programme has focused on life skills. Next term it will have a more academicslant.

Mr Gilmour, who sold his software company, ABC Technology, to United States giant SAS in 2002, has also financed a study by Massey University to evaluate the programme's success.

It has revealed that dreamers showed improved confidence in speaking to their parents and spending more time with them.

In 2003, 15 per cent said their parents did not spend much time speaking to them. In 2004, there were no students in this category.

It also showed that 82 per cent of the students in 2004 said they enjoyed school, compared with 62 per cent last year.

Mr Gilmour declines to talk about how much money he is ploughing into I Have a Dream, but says that signing the cheques is the easy part.

The time he invests is far more important, but "pretty easy to justify".

He says about 70 people are now involved, including the "tireless" programme co-ordinator Ant Backhouse, teachers, children's families and even his own wife and family.

They have become a close-knit team as they work to get the best for the children.

Mr Gilmour said he has met, and can count as friends, people in the voluntary sector he would never have come across in the business world.

"There's a whole legion of them out there, and it is the time, support and resources they give that allows these children to grab all the opportunities."