The Kindness Ledger with Darius Kiss
John Caruso meets the 10-year-old bakery apprentice who’s already teaching adults a thing or two about giving.
Ten-year-old Darius Kiss has a job title. Not a chore chart, not pocket money for taking out the bins – an actual job title. At Simplee Sweet on Buderim, the family bakery run by his mum Rebecca and nan Sally, Darius is Operations Manager. He’s been on the payroll, in some form, since he was three years old.
This year, Darius did something with his wages that most adults could stand to learn from. He wrote an invoice, got paid, and split the money three ways – give, save, spend – a system his mum and nan taught him early. He then took $100 from the “give” pile and handed it to the Buderim Foundation. He’s already decided he’ll do that again next year, and the year after that. Darius chose the Foundation because he loves Buderim, and because he knows exactly where his money is going – back into the community he grew up in.
“It feels good knowing I can help someone who needs it,” he said.
He’s not one for talking it up, either. His mates at school don’t know he’s a donor, and he doesn’t seem fussed about changing that.
“I don’t think they’d listen or understand,” he said, more matter-of-fact than shy about it. It’s not modesty performed for effect – Darius simply doesn’t seem to think it’s a big deal.
Which, of course, is exactly what makes it one. To understand where that instinct comes from, you must go back to 2020, when Rebecca and Sally started baking for frontline hospital workers during the early weeks of COVID. What began as scones and cakes dropped off at Sunshine Coast University Hospital at their own cost turned into six months of near-daily deliveries to police, ambulance, fire crews, lifesavers, LifeFlight and hospital volunteers. Darius, not yet at school, was already in the kitchen with them.
“He’s totally been amongst it since the start. He’s our apprentice and we’d be lost without him,” Rebecca says.
That instinct to bake first and worry about the books later never really left. Simplee Sweet now caters weddings, business events and celebrations across the Coast, but the giving has kept pace with the growing business, with scones and cupcakes still going out regularly to the Maroochy Neighbourhood Centre, Bloomhill Cancer Care Buderim, Wishlist Foundation and people doing it tough.
“When we sell something, it goes straight back into the donations we make,” Rebecca said.
It’s a direct line from there to Darius’ own giving. He didn’t learn generosity from a lecture – he grew up inside it, elbow-deep in dough, watching his mum and nan decide, again and again, that a spare tray of baking was worth more in someone else’s hands. Darius’ $100 is a small thread in a much larger fabric.
The Buderim Foundation has built one of the region’s most significant philanthropic structures, largely away from the spotlight, since its first grants went out in 2008, with more than $10 million now under management and over $3.17 million already returned to local organisations as grants. The Foundation is expanding that reach, launching the Sunshine Coast Community Fund, a new permanent investment fund that will provide grants to community organisations right across the region for generations to come. The new fund will sit alongside the existing Buderim Community Fund and the Thompson Charitable Fund.
Buderim Foundation chairman Rick Woods said the Sunshine Coast Community Fund built on more than $10 million already invested by the Foundation. The model is simple in principle and powerful in practice. Donations are professionally invested, the capital is preserved, and only the earnings are distributed as grants, meaning a gift made once keeps giving, year after year, long after the donor has moved on.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the Thompson Charitable Fund. In 2021, Roy and Nola Thompson entrusted more than $5 million to the Buderim Foundation, a gift that, to date, has delivered over $1.7 million in grants to organisations supporting people facing homelessness, domestic violence and financial crisis, from Lily House to SunnyKids and Gateway Care. Roy and Nola passed recently, and Buderim Foundation paid tribute to a couple whose giving was never about recognition. Their fund lives on exactly as intended, changing outcomes for families who will likely never know their names, for as long as the Sunshine Coast needs it to.
It’s a long way, on paper, from a 10-year-old’s $100. But the principle sitting underneath both gifts is identical: give what you can, to the place you call home, and trust that it will still be working long after you’ve stopped thinking about it. Darius already understands that, whether he’d put it in those words or not. He hopes more kids his age get involved too, maybe through school promotions or signs around town, spreading the idea that you don’t need much to start.
His giving is already making a difference. And if the last few decades are anything to go by, it’s just getting started.
Email simplee_sweet@outlook.com or call 0438 910 880 for Simplee Sweet’s cupcakes, scones, cakes, cookies, grazing platters and more.
Find out more about the work of Buderim Foundation at www.buderimfoundation.org.au
