2021 Impact Report
EDIT: Since publishing this blog post, we have received our formal impact report from NothingButNets.
Scroll to the bottom of the blog post to see it!
We just made our first donation…
Thanks to the hundreds of people who got behind our mission over the past year, we’ve just been able to make our very first donation of $2000AUD to United To Beat Malaria. Our first donation will put insecticide-treated bed-nets, medications, malaria testing kits, and a whole bunch of other good and important tools in the hands of the people who need them the most.
Slightly closer to $2.4 billion…
To be completely honest with you, we are absolutely bloody stoked to have made it to this point. Our whole mission came from the small idea that we could advocate to help fix a big spending gap in the fight to end the scourge of mosquito-borne diseases. In the words of Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organisation, the single biggest issue in the fight against malaria is a, “lack of sustainable, stepped-up funding”. In 2018, $5USD billion was needed to simply sustain the fight against malaria… only $2.6USD billion was raised.
$2000AUD isn’t going to fill that funding gap all by itself, but with big problems like malaria, clichés are pretty appropriate: when a child is dying every two minutes from an entirely preventable diseases every little does help. Lots of little actions that do a little bit of good can create a lot of good when you put them all together. With the right attitude, we can hope to end mosquito-borne diseases in our lifetime.
Hey! You! Yeah, you! This is all your doing…
Let’s be clear. This isn’t our donation, it’s yours. This donation belongs to the hundreds of you (crazy!!!) who got behind our mission and showed the world that the simple choices matter – that putting on a t-shirt might be an everyday decision, but that it doesn’t have to be an ordinary one, it can can be a way to keep people safe from a thousand miles away. Our mozzie-free-tees are designed with a clear two-for-one benefit: when the profit from each mozzie-repellent shirt sold helps buy things like mozzie nets (that can give 2 people safe sleep, protected from malaria for up to 3 years), peace of mind for you means a peaceful sleep for two.
Thanks to United To Beat Malaria, the money that you have helped us raise will now be put to work protecting people with mozzie nets and a whole host of other cheap, effective, and accessible tools. Last year, their work was focussed on some of the refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This year, they’re working hard to tackle malaria in Nigeria, a country which accounts for 27% of all malaria infections each year. (We’ll be letting you know a lot more about this current campaign in the weeks to come - make sure you’re on the mailing list to stay in the loop.)
Jonathan Kidwell from United To Beat Malaria (formerly called Nothing But Nets) was kind enough to pass along a video for you all!
Rome wasn’t built by one person (or something like that)!
This really is more than just the work of a few people, and there are a fair few legends we’d love to give a special mention to. To kick off our equivalent of an Academy Awards thank you speech, we’d love to give a massive thanks to Alex Zelinksy, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Newcastle. Thanks to him we were able to compete in the Grand Challenge, and have a crack at solving a big, bad problem.
“We’re extremely proud of Borne Clothing’s success, of their commitment to sustainability and their generous donation to this worthwhile cause. Borne is exactly the kind of success story we at the University of Newcastle had hoped would come about from the Grand Challenge. Tim, Bal, Pat and Dan are a wonderful example of interdisciplinary teamwork, combining their broad range of studies and knowledge to come up with a socially and environmentally responsible solution to the complex problem of mosquito-borne diseases. Personally, I’m excited to see the team’s next steps.”
— Alex Zelinksy, Vice-Chancellor and President at University of Newcastle
A massive thank you to these excellent people:
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Alex Johns from thirdwheelin.co, thank you for being our fiercest supporter and our very first model, for your awesome product photography, and for helping us pick up free furniture from all around Newcastle for our warehouse!
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Jonathan Kidwell and Carly James at United To Beat Malaria, thank you for being alongside us from our humble beginnings just over a year ago. We are continually blown away by the commitment you’ve shown to us in building Borne Clothing. So much of what we have done is off the back of your hard work and thorough communication, and we are excited to grow our partnership ever further into the future.
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Sonja Duncan and Richard Birdsey at SD Strategies, thank you for your time, your wine, and your willingness and wisdom in helping us understand what it means to create a safe and sustainable supply chain.
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Siobhan Curran and Richard Berry at the I2N Network, thank you for your support from the get-go, and for creating the space for people to have a crack at tackling the big problems, and providing the opportunity to build something meaningful. The Grand Challenge has been a clear financial boost for us, and has given us the confidence to head out on our own!
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Elizabeth Symington at the Newcastle Weekly, thank you for inviting us along for our first ever news article! Your writing is framed in our warehouse and will forever be kept in pride of place!
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SEFA and Macquarie Group, thank you for the opportunity to participate in the 2020 Kickstarter Program. The $10k grant has allowed us to grow much more quickly than we had expected. Paul Petherbridge and Daniel Sinfield, you were great mentors for the process, and we owe much of our collective thinking to you both.
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To Dane Crawford, Richard Claut, and the rest of the teams at Commercial Collective and RTC Group, thank you for putting $10k behind local business. The Australian social enterprise community is blooming, and initiatives like your own will make sure it lives up to its potential.
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To the teams at Linktree and Square - a big thanks for awarding us a Silver in the PassionFund. You’ve given us a financial boost and a platform to help spread our passion: making big impact with the power of small choices!
The four of us at Borne Clothing have been blown away by the support that so many of you have shown us. Ending malaria and mosquito-borne diseases is a massive dream. Way too big for a team of four people. It’ll take many, many more of us. We’re grateful that you’ve chosen to sign up to our mission. It’s your mission now, too, and we can’t wait to see how far we can go together!
Borne Clothing Impact Report
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