A new home at ThinkPlace for an extraordinary social change maker.

Daniel Silkstone — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 05:35:35 +0000

Australia

A new home at ThinkPlace for an extraordinary social change maker.

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If you set out to achieve something truly ambitious in the world but life and its many challenges kept getting in the way, how long would you keep going? Refusing to quit?

A year? Two years?

How about nine?

That is the remarkable story behind ThinkPlace’s newest recruit to its Canberra Design Studio: Danielle Dal Cortivo.

Almost a decade ago, having travelled to Tanzania and seeing first-hand the conditions that orphaned children were living in, Dal Cortivo decided she had to do something about it. Together with her brother – a Canberra builder – she hatched a plan. With donated materials and labour the pair would build a house in suburban Canberra. Then they would auction it off and donate the proceeds to children’s charities in Botswana and at home.

It was supposed to take three years.

Now, after nine years of toil and countless setbacks that she says “meant I probably should have walked away from this a hundred times” the house is about to be completed. And with it will come a bounty that is expected to approach a million dollars.

“It has been an incredible journey,” she says of the ‘raize the roof’ project that has gathered donations from more than 350 businesses and collected materials and labour valued at more than $400,000.

“I am so excited that we are about to finish and that the focus can shift to how the money we’re raising can make a remarkable difference for kids who really need it.”

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Saturday, 6 October 2018

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ThinkPlace - Design in Development

A new home at ThinkPlace for an extraordinary social change maker.

A new home at ThinkPlace for an extraordinary social change maker.