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Graduate is Young Citizen of the Year
University of the Sunshine Coast graduate Laura Monaghan, 24, has won the Sunshine Coast Regional Council’s Young Citizen of the Year award for 2009.
Laura received the award at a special Australia Day event at Noosaville on 25 January in recognition of her keen interest in improving the Sunshine Coast community.
“I’m still quite shocked that I won,” she said. “It was a big surprise for me. It’s a real honour to be in a field of young people who have done so much for the community, and then to be chosen for the award.”
Laura graduated from USC with a Bachelor of Arts in May 2006 and immediately began working as a Learning for Life Worker at The Smith Family's Maroochydore branch.
Her work involves offering children from disadvantaged families better educational prospects through financial and tutoring assistance.
“I think education is the key to many of the issues in the world,” she said.
“If people are educated, they can make educated choices and decisions. They can really make things happen. Education can help overcome financial disadvantage and other issues of inequality.”
As well as her full-time job with The Smith Family, Laura is involved in youth welfare on the Coast through the YMCA, and she recently started studying Law part-time at the Queensland University of Technology.
She plans to use her legal studies to further assist Sunshine Coast families who are facing difficulties.
Laura said her experiences at the University of the Sunshine Coast – where she majored in International Relations and completed minors in Indonesian, Australian History and Public Relations – opened her eyes to what she could achieve.
“I was not aware of what I wanted to do until I came to USC and there were so many opportunities,” she said.
These included helping to organise the region’s annual multicultural celebration, Festuri, in 2005 (then continuing on as a festival volunteer from 2006-2008) and travelling to Indonesia in December 2005 to further develop her language skills.
Laura said these experiences gave her a better understanding of how she could help the Sunshine Coast community, and boosted her enjoyment of being a student at USC.
“I also loved the fact that the University was really relaxed and that I could talk one-on-one with the lecturers. I was certainly not just a number,” she said.
— Terry Walsh