Courage to Care explores new strategies for spreading its ‘universal message’

With few Holocaust survivors remaining, NSW CEO ED ST JOHN tells MICHAEL VISONTAY about the innovations underway to sustain its mission to combat discrimination through survivors’ stories.

How do you chart a long-term future for an organisation whose core assets are in short supply and will, sooner rather than later, be gone altogether?

That may sound like a harsh way to describe the Holocaust survivors who have made Courage to Care (C2C) a powerful educational and ethical asset for schools and communities. But that is the key challenge facing the organisation as it strives to “inform and educate Australians about the dangers of prejudice, racism and discrimination” through the stories of survivors.

For Ed St John, the inaugural CEO of Courage to Care in NSW, it’s just one of many he has been grappling with since taking up the role last October. The solution remains a work-in-progress for the former Executive General Manager at the (St James) Ethics Centre in Sydney, who brings an obvious enthusiasm as well as a strong skill and ethical fit to the role.

“I've done a lot of things in my career and I’ve realised that what draws me to organisations is a strong sense of purpose, and people who are passionate about sending a message out,” he told The Jewish Independent in a recent interview.

“When I saw what Courage To Care does, it was quite similar in many ways to what the Ethics Centre does, which is to help people be better humans, make better decisions and to have the tools to function better in society.”

In the landscape of C2C, that revolves around the idea of being an “upstander”, someone who intervenes on behalf of a person being attacked or bullied. “We say discrimination exists on a continuum: at the most benign level, it just takes the form of a kind of joke, or casual racism or a ‘micro aggression’, as they call it,” St John explains.