Help us switch on the Future Care Network!

I founded The Future Care Project because after 2 years of research we discovered the data being used to plan childcare in regional, rural and remote Australia is wrong. Not slightly off, structurally flawed in every way.

National datasets count the services that exist, not the families who can't access them. They measure utilisation, not unmet need. The result is a picture of regional childcare that bears little resemblance to what families and employers are actually living. Currently every funding decision which you have seen overlook your communities needs, every policy reform, every "national childcare plan" is being built on top of that flawed picture.

This gap, it has a cost. It's the reason regional communities keep being told their needs are being met when they aren't. It's the reason employers can't fill jobs, families can't return to work and towns lose the people they can least afford to lose.

When a community does not appear in the numbers, it does not appear in the funding, the planning or the policy. Thats exactly why childcare deserts exisit and without the correct data being collected the problem will only compound.

In the most recent quarter, 1,451,860 children from 1,020,930 families held a place with a Long Daycare Centre or a Family Daycare. Read one way, that is a large system working. Read another way, it is a map with the edges torn off.

Let me explain, based on these figures, only 49.7% of children aged 0 to 5 across Australia can access goverment approved childcare. Which means that more than half of all young children cannot. The figures cannot tell us how many of those families bear the personal cost of that gap, whether through a parent forced out of work, household income lost or wellbeing worn down.

So we built the Future Care Network to change that.

It makes the invisible visible. It shows the true picture of how rural, regional, and remote communities are faring on childcare access, gap by gap, town by town. For the first time, the families who have been missing from the map can be seen.

The Network does more than show the problem. It connects families with educators close to home. It helps parents find care that actually exists in their community and it gives support to the people who provide that care, whether they are In-Home Care and Family Day Care educators, nannies or au pairs. Every carer we help onboard means more places for children, more parents able to work and more local support in towns that need it.

The software is built. Now we need to switch it on.

We are raising $100,000 to take the Future Care Network from a finished build to a living platform serving real families, starting here in Goondiwindi as a first of its kind pilot. Prove it here, and we make the case for change everywhere. This funding covers the legal, compliance, data and infrastructure work that turns a tool into a trusted service families and educators can rely on.

This is where community and business meet. For families, it means finding care that was always out of reach. For local businesses, it means a workforce that can show up, because childcare is the quiet infrastructure that holds a regional economy together. When parents cannot find care, businesses cannot find staff. Solving one solves the other.

We have done the hard part. We have the research, the model and now the platform. What we need is the community and the businesses who believe that no family should be invisible and no town should be written off because it is too small or too far away.

Help us switch on the Future Care Network. Help us make sure every family, in every place, can be seen and supported.

Want a snap shot into what else we are working on? Find out more here!