Jack Manning Bancroft

Jack Manning Bancroft is the CEO and Founder of AIME, an award-winning social movement that uses mentoring and imagination to unlock the potential of marginalised youth to create a fairer world.

AIME is an imaginative educational program and a volunteer mentoring movement – a social network for good.

Jack, a proud Indigenous Australian from the Bundjalung nation, founded AIME in 2005 at the age of 19, with the goal of finding a solution to Indigenous inequality in Australia. Driven by imagination and audacious kindness, he re-engineered the concept of mentoring. He developed a cost-effective and scalable model that brings university students together as volunteers to mentor marginalised and minority high schools kids so that they complete high school successfully, go on to university and ultimately, into fulfilling careers.

Over the past 16 years, AIME’s mentoring tools and techniques, including its Imagination Curriculum, of which Jack has been the lead designer, have helped transform schooling for thousands of marginalised kids.

Jack’s vision is to unlock the AIME Imagination Curriculum for every school in the world and train teachers to be mentors so we can achieve educational parity and beyond for marginalised kids across the world.

Jack has received a string of awards and recognition for his work, his philosophy and his vision for a fairer world. He was MJ Bale’s Man of Character in 2014 and won Australia’s Happy Harold Education Award in 2013. In 2010, five years after founding AIME, he received the Australian Human Rights Medal, GQ Man of Inspiration, New South Wales Young Australian of the Year and the University of Sydney Young Alumni of the Year awards.

Jack holds a BA in Media and Communications from the University of Sydney. He was awarded the Stanford Australia Foundation Dyson Bequest Scholarship in 2013 to attend Stanford University’s flagship Executive Program. In 2016 he received an Honorary Fellowship from Western Sydney University, and in the same year he became the youngest person in Australian history to receive an Honorary Doctorate from the University of South Australia.

Jack is also a published children’s author with The Eagle Inside, and has written The Mentor and Mentoring – The Key to a Fairer World.