Adam Goodes and Michael O'Loughlin 'want more black faces in the boardroom'
When former Swans star Michael O'Loughlin was growing up, $5 could mean the difference between going on a school excursion or missing out.
"My mum didn't have five bucks to do that. So I certainly missed a lot of those things growing up through primary school and high school," he said.
Although money was tight, his mother drummed into him and his five siblings the importance of a good education.
"If I was in trouble at school, if I played up at school or if I hadn't completed homework, there was no football training and no football on the weekend, so that was nailed into me really, really early in," O'Loughlin said.
It's a message he's spreading with friend and former Swans teammate Adam Goodes through their GO Foundation. Established nearly 10 years ago to provide scholarships for Indigenous students from kindergarten to university, it now has 68 scholars across 15 schools and universities.
Like O'Loughlin, Goodes knows firsthand just how far a bit of extra support can go.
"I'm a public school person. I think I got through OK. Financially, something that helped me get through was AbStudy. That extra bit of money and support helped me, as an individual. And what we're trying to do is help those kids who are academically gifted, and want to go on to university and VET courses," Goodes said.
Although they made careers playing footy, sharing a combined 675 games and nearly 1,000 goals, Goodes and O'Loughlin wanted to encourage young people to look beyond the footy field.
"We wanted to concentrate purely on education, we wanted to help our community and just inspire our younger generation to go onto bigger and better things. I always say that we want more black faces in the boardroom, we want our brothers and sisters in suits and ties, running around in big organisations, becoming CEOs and in the top end of town," O'Loughlin said.
'They give me more passion to do more'
As well as being teammates, Goodes and O'Loughlin have always been close friends. But it was only while filming the SBS series, Who Do You Think You Are, that they learnt just how close they actually were: O'Loughlin, 41, is the nephew of Goodes, 38.
"Once I knew that he was my nephew, I knew that he had to respect me a little bit more than what he does," Goodes joked.
As a player, Goodes used his status to call out racism on the field and in wider society. His embrace of his culture and refusal to accept racism saw him booed from the field and criticised by commentators.
But the backlash motivated him to inspire other young Indigenous people, and help those who, like him, didn't grow up with a strong connection to culture.
"That anger and negativity of learning about the colonisation, the massacres — you know, it didn't stop me in my tracks, what it did was energise me to do more and to raise awareness," Goodes said.
"There's education that we all need to go through, and those things, they give me more passion to do more. To have a vehicle like the GO Foundation to inspire young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women is fantastic," Goodes said.
Goodes and O'Loughlin believe immersing young people in their culture and helping them reconnect with it is a crucial part of the GO Foundation's success.
"Some of them, they don't actually know where they're from and who their people are, and that learning experience is a great tool to be able to use to motivate and find inner strength and know that you've got this culture that's thousands and thousands and thousands of years old that's behind you," O'Loughlin said.
"Culture cannot be understated in what we're trying to do at the foundation. It plays a huge and important role for us."