Building A Digital Presence For Good
3 October 2025 at 9:00 am
Sites4Good, a nonprofit run by student volunteers at UWA that builds custom websites—free of charge—for charities across Australia. They are proud to support small, often-overlooked organizations that lack the resources to establish a strong digital presence. Jay Tonai-Moore is a West Australian university student working with Sites4Good, and is profiled below as this weeks Pro Bono Australia Change Maker!
Describe Your Life and Career trajectory up till this point.
I’d say my career so far might appear sporadic. I’ve worked in a hard ore body laboratory as a lab tech and hanging halfway off a cliff demonstrating abseil. Like all Sites4Good designers I’m currently a full-time student and I am now starting a master’s in theoretical physics. While my studies are very conceptually technical and mathematic the work, we do at Sites4Good is design and people orientated. I grew up in a medium sized rural Australia town, the kind of place with one high school, three pubs and everyone smiles and waves their way down the main street which is somehow a highway. I think growing up in a small town gave me a real sense of community, I grew up volunteering with the shire and joined local SES unit the moment I turned 18. Which is probably why I was drawn to Site4Good when I moved Perth despite building websites being conceptually separate from physics and lab work and dangling on the side of quarry.
Take us through a Typical Day
My typical day is quite boring most of my time is spent trying to understand physics papers that have so many equations that half the letters are Greek or writing three pages of integrals just to get the wrong answer and have to start again. The days I spend working with Sites4Good are much more interesting we give workshops to our students, reach out to new clients and work with our teams to build websites that look good and are functional. As Partnerships director I spend time comminating with the charities we are currently working with and the charities we built websites for in the past to helping them maintain their sites. The best part of my day is when a client email comes and gives me a good reason to stop wasting paper trying to get that integral right.
Tell us about the biggest challenge you’ve faced and how you overcame it
The biggest challenge I’ve faced was moving up to the city to peruse a physics degree. Try telling you chemist boss your leaving work to study physics, you will never hear the end of it. In all seriousness, I spent my childhood in a little bubble at the bottom of the world, and don’t get me wrong I loved and love that little bubble, I but stepping out of it was daunting. I was never a super social child and surprising most physics departments in the world are full of people who were not very social children. I could have very easily spent the time of my undergraduate degree locked in a room alone with an impossible integral. I got over this the only way you can, by stepping out of that bubble even if its daunting. I joined Sites4Good and met people who weren’t inflicted with that slight madness that comes with trying to understand quantum mechanics. I found a new community and suddenly that comfortable little bubble that I was so scared to leave got bigger and I didn’t have to leave it.
If you could go back in time, what advice would you give your younger self?
If I could go back in time, I would tell my younger self how to time travel allowing me to time travel earlier. If I could give my younger self advice, I’d tell them that just because you can do something alone doesn’t mean you should. Long gone are the days when physics, and the world, can be changed by a genius alone in a locked room. The world has become so big and interconnected and complex that it is so easy to get lost in it all, to lose sight of what you want, of what you should be doing. It is very easy to put you head down and follow your noise, every day so chaotic, every step so small that you don’t even notice your walking in circles. The only way to make meaningful changes, to make head way is to work with others, to ground and guide each other.
How do you unwind when not working?
To unwind from work I like to undertake some hobby crafting, sewing, crochet and origami. I think a shirt wears better when you made it, and it is very cathartic to fold failed integrals in to little flowers.
