InStyle
  • Fashion
  • Celebrity
  • Beauty
  • Hair
  • Lifestyle
  • Podcasts
  • Women Of Style
  • Video
InStyle
  • Fashion
  • Celebrity
  • Beauty
  • Hair
  • Lifestyle
  • Podcasts
  • Women Of Style
  • Video
Subscribe
Prince George & Princess Charlotte Get Their Own Christmas Trees, Kate Middleton's Mom Reveals
Watch 0:54

Prince George & Princess Charlotte Get Their Own Christmas Trees, Kate Middleton's Mom Reveals

{headline}

{headline}

Women Of Style: Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE

Women Of Style: Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE

Women of Style: Gloria Steinem

Women of Style: Gloria Steinem

Women Of Style: Melissa Doyle

Women Of Style: Melissa Doyle

Women of Style: Nikki Warburton

Women of Style: Nikki Warburton

{headline}

{headline}

How The InStyle Team Get Red Carpet Ready For Women Of Style

How The InStyle Team Get Red Carpet Ready For Women Of Style

Women Of Style: Megan Larsen

Women Of Style: Megan Larsen

Moments You Missed From The InStyle And Audi Women Of Style Awards

Moments You Missed From The InStyle And Audi Women Of Style Awards

{headline}

{headline}

Shop The InStyle And Audi Women Of Style Gift Bag

Shop The InStyle And Audi Women Of Style Gift Bag

Congratulations To The Instyle And Audi Women Of Style 2018 Award Recipients!

Congratulations To The Instyle And Audi Women Of Style 2018 Award Recipients!

All The Must-See Red Carpet Looks From The InStyle & Audi Women Of Style Awards

All The Must-See Red Carpet Looks From The InStyle & Audi Women Of Style Awards

10 Years Of Women Of Style: Dr Dharmica Mistry

10 Years Of Women Of Style: Dr Dharmica Mistry

10 Years Of Women Of Style: Melanie Perkins

10 Years Of Women Of Style: Melanie Perkins

10 Years Of Women Of Style: Dr Emma Fulu

10 Years Of Women Of Style: Dr Emma Fulu

10 Years Of Women Of Style: Yassmin Abdel-Magied

10 Years Of Women Of Style: Yassmin Abdel-Magied

  1. Home
  2. Women Of Style

Women of Style: Juliette Wright

Meet the incredible founder of GIVIT - by Rachel Sharp
  • 18 Mar 2020
Women of Style: Juliette Wright

One dollar from every sale of this issue will be donated to GIVIT, the charity state governments officially call on for grassroots disaster relief. Meet Juliette Wright, its incredible founder, who now draws the support of Oscar winners, a former president and even royalty.

It all started over a decade ago with an especially chubby baby. Brisbane-based Juliette Wright didn’t want to drop her newborn son’s beautiful unworn baby clothes into a dirty, malodorous charity bin. Still, she struggled to find a way to pass them directly to another mum in need. And so the seed for GIVIT was sown.

The concept for the charity is so elegantly simple, it’s hard to believe no-one else in the world had attempted it. In a nutshell, GIVIT’s mostly automated website allows more than 3,000 registered Australian charities to list the specific needs of impoverished or crisis-affected individuals in their communities. If you have it and can spare it, you can pledge it with the click of a button. To date, more than 1.6 million items have found their way into the hands of Australians in need.

“Charities do amazing stuff, but they don’t have a warehouse full of donations out the back for a rainy day,” says Wright, 47, who left her career as a naturopath and nutritionist to run the not-for-profit full-time, and has since earned a host of awards, including the Order of Australia, for her tireless efforts. “Charities can’t provide an old man with a microwave or a young mum a bike with a baby carriage on the back. They don’t have a water tank sitting around during natural disasters that they can give to a farmer. So I decided to create a website to help.”

Technical issues, however, almost scuppered the whole plan before it began. “I paid someone $500 to design the first site, and it was a disaster, so I put my husband and I on a diet to save the meat money and raised $900 to try again.” The second developer, like the first, couldn’t nail the automated functions she needed. “I felt like a failure. Then my husband Glen, who turned 50 in February, gave me $5,000 to build a ‘good’ website, bless him. He’s from a dairy family outside of Warwick [Queensland] and knew GIVIT could be a way to make sure our most impoverished get exactly what they need. Within a week of launching, the website was going berserk and I was working on it full-time.”

Nine months after that, her charity evolved to serve yet another function. “The system had done about 3,000 donations before Cyclone Yasi hit Queensland in January 2011. Then-premier Anna Bligh’s team called me and said, ‘Can you manage offers of goods and connect them to charities?’ Of course I said yes. Over the next 10 days, the site had 1.8 million hits. We had 35,000 donations in two-and-a-half weeks.”

WOS Juliette Wright

Since then, GIVIT has, unfortunately, needed to step in after almost a dozen more major disasters. It’s the current bushfire donation partner of the NSW government, and the Queensland government’s official partner for the distribution of charity goods during any natural disaster. In a sad indication of our climate-change-affected times, the federal government funded GIVIT to modify its website so it can manage multiple disasters at once.

It was during Cyclone Debbie in 2017, as North Queensland was being obliterated, that Wright had the sudden epiphany her donation portal could be devastating, too. “If we brought in all the free fridges and washing machines, mattresses and food they required after the cyclone, there was no way the local retailers would have survived. Nobody can compete with free! So the executive board of GIVIT agreed with me that we should only buy locally in times of disaster, or when we’re dealing with rural and remote regions.” Her initial fears that GIVIT would lose support when they started asking for cold hard cash rather than goods were thankfully unfounded. “All walks of life have donated—beautiful grandmothers, children in kindergartens, even major corporates, including a lot of mining companies.” International cash donations, like those they received after celebrities such as Jennifer Aniston, Pink, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and Barack Obama recommended GIVIT on their social channels following the recent bushfires, have been a godsend. Today, Wright gets almost as many thank-you letters from grateful small businesses as she does charities.

While it’s clear what recipients and even donors get out of GIVIT, Wright’s personal rewards are harder to pinpoint. Despite all the accolades, the charity’s success has come with considerable personal sacrifice for her young family. “I didn’t have funding for seven years,” she says of the large-scale passion project. “My husband is completely the father of GIVIT, for the fact that he funded me so I didn’t have to get a job while I built this up. Our office still runs on the smell of an oily rag. There are only 20 staff, not all of us full time, but we’ve got about 50 volunteers across the nation. Australians are the most generous nation in the world with our time and items and money. GIVIT has been built on millions of volunteer hours.”

Wright does sometimes stop and wonder how different her life would be had she thrown in the towel at that second website. “I’d have a few less working-mum guilt trips. I’ve been doing this for my children’s whole lives. But I believe gratitude is an antidepressant. When you go onto the website and see what other people are living through…well, let’s just say I don’t have a lot of stuff I don’t need under my stairs anymore.

“Sign up for the GIVIT newsletter,” she urges. “See if there are any items you can donate in your local area, then watch how quickly you feel connected to your community. I believe when you fill a real and urgent need, it has a profound impact on you and your own sense of wellbeing.”

After 11 years, she also has countless tear-jerking stories that fuel her passion. “For example, the children’s charity that needed closed-toe work boots. They explained that a whole family was homeless, but if we got the father a pair of work boots, he’d be able to apply for work on the roads, which would pull the whole family out of poverty.”

Then there was the young man whose partner had died during childbirth leaving him with a new baby who had breathing issues. “He [the father] was not doing well. The hospital had requested a [second-hand] mattress and cot for him, but I said no, he needs a new one. So we put a request for a cot voucher on the website. It was donated in two minutes! And the same woman donated a breathing monitor as well. That made me realise the value of telling people exactly what others in their community need.

“My least-favourite story is the request for a boxing bag in Western Australia. At first I thought that was a ‘want’ rather than a ‘need’ and shouldn’t be on the site. But the charity came back and stressed it was definitely needed. Two weeks after it was donated, they wrote to me and said, ‘Thank you for donating the boxing bag to the mum. Since installing it at her house, her boys have not hit her once.’ So trust that what’s on the GIVIT website is verified and that a local person on the ground, a social worker, has requested exactly what someone needs. Then go see if you’ve got something under your stairs that can help, too!”

That grassroots philosophy has seen GIVIT draw friends in high places. In January, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, was so impressed she made a personal donation. “She [told us] she’d been devastated by what she watched happening to Australians in the fire-impacted communities and she liked that [we were] a practical way to support the needs of residents. Her donation bought 18 back-to-school packs for kids affected by fire in Ebor, NSW. She also bought fencing material for families who had fires through their properties, plus filled tanks full of water where there was no drinkable water,” Wright says.

“That’s the fantastic thing about GIVIT: there is now a real, tangible way you can actually help people who have been affected by disaster. When I started, my dream was to alleviate the effects of poverty. Now what floats my boat is the idea of making a massive difference to one person, today. That could be to my child, or my husband, or someone I’ll never meet.” 

Visit givit.org.au

WOS GIVIT
Celeste Barber InStyle Australia cover
  • Lifestyle
  • WOS
Women Of Style
Woman Of Words

Woman Of Words

Celeste Barber Is Our April Cover Star!

Celeste Barber Is Our April Cover Star!

Women of Style: Juliette Wright

Women of Style: Juliette Wright

Women Of Style

Woman Of Words

Woman Of Words

Celeste Barber Is Our April Cover Star!

Celeste Barber Is Our April Cover Star!

Women of Style: Juliette Wright

Women of Style: Juliette Wright

Marta Dusseldorp On Using Her Platform For Change

Marta Dusseldorp On Using Her Platform For Change

How Melinda Gates Is Opening Doors for Women in Tech

How Melinda Gates Is Opening Doors for Women in Tech

Nicole Warne Shadbolt Is Our February Cover Star!

Nicole Warne Shadbolt Is Our February Cover Star!

Women Of Style: Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE

Women Of Style: Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE

Women of Style: Gloria Steinem

Women of Style: Gloria Steinem

Women Of Style: Anna Spiro

Women Of Style: Anna Spiro

Women Of Style: Melissa Doyle

Women Of Style: Melissa Doyle

Women Of Style: Kate Bosworth

Women Of Style: Kate Bosworth

Women of Style: Nikki Warburton

Women of Style: Nikki Warburton

Inside The 2019 Georg Jensen x OCRF Luncheon

Inside The 2019 Georg Jensen x OCRF Luncheon

Women of Style: Dr Chantel Thornton

Women of Style: Dr Chantel Thornton

5 Amazing Australian Business Women Who Are Striving For Change

5 Amazing Australian Business Women Who Are Striving For Change

9 Women-Led Brands You Need To Know About

9 Women-Led Brands You Need To Know About

Every Look From The 2019 InStyle And Audi Women Of Style Awards

Every Look From The 2019 InStyle And Audi Women Of Style Awards

7 Lessons We Learnt From 2019's Women Of Style

7 Lessons We Learnt From 2019's Women Of Style

Celeste Barber Turns Heads On The InStyle And Audi Women Of Style Awards Red Carpet

Celeste Barber Turns Heads On The InStyle And Audi Women Of Style Awards Red Carpet

P.E Nation’s Pip Edwards And Claire Tregoning On Women Empowering Women

P.E Nation’s Pip Edwards And Claire Tregoning On Women Empowering Women

Phoebe Tonkin’s Unexpected Beauty Hack For Surviving A Long Night

Phoebe Tonkin’s Unexpected Beauty Hack For Surviving A Long Night

Elyse Knowles Talks Style And Sustainability On The InStyle And Audi Women Of Style Awards Red Carpet

Elyse Knowles Talks Style And Sustainability On The InStyle And Audi Women Of Style Awards Red Carpet

Marta Dusseldorp On Celebrating Women

Marta Dusseldorp On Celebrating Women

Julie Bishop Proves She's A Style Icon At The InStyle And Audi Women Of Style Awards

Julie Bishop Proves She's A Style Icon At The InStyle And Audi Women Of Style Awards

Anna Heinrich Shares The One Fashion Tip She’s Learnt From Her Mum

Anna Heinrich Shares The One Fashion Tip She’s Learnt From Her Mum

SPONSORED BY AUDI, VEUVE CLICQUOT, CAROLINA HERRERA FRAGRANCE AND CLARINS
InStyle
  • About Us
  • Subscribe Today
  • Contact Us
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
InStyle Magazine Subscribe
  • About Us
  • Subscribe Today
  • Contact Us
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy

Brands

  • Beauty Crew
  • Home Beautiful
  • marie claire
  • Who

Our Network

  • Better Homes and Gardens
  • BHG Shop
  • New Idea food
  • New Idea
  • That’s Life
  • All Recipes
  • Practical Parenting
  • 7plus
  • 7News
  • Health Engine
  • Starts at 60
  • The West Australian
  • Perth Now
  • Airtasker
  • Society One
  • Bounty Parents
© 2021 Are Media PTY LTD
Get more from InStyle

Magazine Subscription Offer

FREE Edible Beauty ‘& Gold Rush’ Eye Cream-SAVE 36%*

Shop This Offer
FREE Edible Beauty ‘& Gold Rush’ Eye Cream