When Hannah Andrevski founded children’s charity Roundabout Canberra to provide essential baby and children’s items to families in need, she says, she had no idea of the extent of the problem of child poverty.

Roundabout supports children from newborns to the age of 16, supplying 130 local services – government agencies, hospitals, schools, migrant and refugee support services, women’s refuges – and 700 social workers with books, toys, clothing, nappies, toiletries, school bags, cots, prams, car seats, and highchairs.

“The idea is that anything that a family might need for their children can come from Roundabout,” Ms Andrevski said.

“Many Canberrans live and work in a fairly middle-class, comfortable bubble. I often have people saying to me: ‘Oh, I’m really surprised that there’s a need for a service like this in Canberra.’”

But need exists across Canberra, and is worsening year by year, driven by rising cost-of-living pressures.

“We’ve seen more and more families needing help, because there’s only so long that families can hold on for,” Ms Andrevski said.

Some children lack nappies or clothes that fit. Primary school children refuse to go to school because they do not have what their peers have; they carry their belongings in plastic bags instead of backpacks and lunchboxes. Roundabout hears of a woman and her two teenage sons sleeping in her car; other families sleep in sheds and tents at the Cotter.

Roundabout helped 5,401 children in 2025, 16 per cent more than in 2024. This year alone, Roundabout has already helped 4,000 children, and Ms Andrevski expects to support more than 6,000 by the end of it.  Demand is around 20 per cent higher than last year. Nor does Ms Andrevski expect it to end next year: she assumes that fuel prices and the cost of food will remain high, and that the housing crisis won’t go away anytime soon.

“The demand is definitely going up. Every year, we think: is this the point where things will start to peter out? But we’ve seen that steady increase in need each year. It’s not going down.”

Before founding Roundabout, Ms Andrevski used to give away items her children had outgrown for free on Facebook Marketplace and Gumtree; she was never sure they ended up with the people who needed them. She asked local charities whether a Melbourne model for rehoming children’s items with families in need could work in Canberra. Women’s refuge Karinya House told her that it would meet a need: other services were referring women to them who needed material items for their babies, taking away their capacity to provide wraparound support.

Ms Andrevski founded Roundabout in 2018 – and six years later, she was named 2024 Canberra Citizen of the Year in recognition of her commitment to supporting families in need.

“We’ve very much filled a gap in the sector, and have come to be relied upon very heavily,” Ms Andrevski said. “Being able to hand something tangible over to families is key in terms of rapport building and ability to address homelessness, domestic violence, and other complex challenges that require a lot of trust for a family to seek and receive help from a service.

“It’s freed up a lot of time and resources for services too. Karinya House used to hear countless stories about social workers using their spare time to track down a cot on Gumtree, so a mum could be discharged from hospital, or taking a client to an op shop to rifle through the racks to try to find clothing for their three children. Now it’s all prepared, ready to go, and can play an important role in building a relationship between the service and the family that they’re supporting.”

Around 40 per cent of those families are single mothers, while migrant and refugee families are another large group. While many experience long-term systemic disadvantage, recently Roundabout has seen families that were doing OK before something pushed them over the edge, Ms Andrevski said: an injury at work, the loss of a job, the death of a breadwinner. “Families who have been just managing cannot manage anymore, and need support,” Ms Andrevski said. “People were just getting by, and an event has knocked them into that place where they’re not OK.”

Some 300 volunteers clean and sort donated items, check they are safe, and make sure they are in excellent condition, to “make them look beautiful and get them ready for families”.

“One of our values is dignity,” Ms Andrevski said. “We’re not just about passing on any old second-hand item. It’s about passing on items to families during difficult times that make them feel like the community’s put some love and care into it, and that there is someone thinking about them and supporting them through difficult times.”

Roundabout’s support enables parents to get out of the house and connect with their community, Ms Andrevski said. Without a pram or a car seat, some parents might not be able to attend medical appointments, or even take their older children to school.

“We don’t think that by providing material items we’re necessarily solving poverty,” Ms Andrevski said. “But we hear that families have to make very difficult choices about where they direct their money: paying for rent, putting fuel in their car, buying the items that they need for their kids, medical expenses. By us meeting this one need for them, it allows them to free up their funds to direct to the other things that they need.”

One woman that Roundabout helped, for instance, was part of a playgroup, but never joined other parents for coffee because she could not afford to buy herself a coffee or her children drinks. When Roundabout gave her nappies and wipes, that donation meant she could have a coffee that week.

“It seems so small – the cost of a coffee,” Ms Andrevski said. “Even things like social connection are impacted for families.”

Dignity is one of the charity’s core values – it is fundamental to community connection and participation, confidence, and mental health, Ms Andrevski said.

“When you’re looking at a baby, we’re really supporting the dignity of the parents. It’s a great thing for them to be able to push a pram that they feel proud about. We get some beautiful items donated, and we love being able to pass those onto people, and for them to have nice clothes to dress their baby in.

“But when you look at school-age children, it really becomes about the dignity of that child. That’s when kids start to notice differences. There can be cruel comments at school. We hear lots of stories about kids not going to school, or not wanting to go to school, because they don’t have the same things that other kids have. Being able to provide a backpack, a lunchbox, and a drink bottle to a child, so they feel like they’ve got the things that other kids have, is something that we feel really strongly about.”

Ms Andrevski sees supporting children and families experiencing poverty as a multi-sector, whole community effort, not a government or charity problem.

“That’s how you deliver support that has an impact,” she said. “That’s what we really see done well at Roundabout. We have businesses that back the work we do. We have a great partnership with government that plays an important part in our ability to meet the needs of the community.”

The community is involved as volunteers, and by donating items. Families are urged to clean out their cupboards and donate items their children have outgrown to Roundabout.

“Being able to support 6,000 children requires a lot of stuff,” Ms Andrevski said. “We have this constant need for really high-quality pre-loved items from the community, so that it is like a gift for the families that we’re giving them to.”

When something is desperately needed, Ms Andrevski said, the charity can turn to the community. Over winter, for example, Roundabout had no school-age boys’ clothing; they put out an ask on social media, and the community responded. This week, their most needed items are baby baths; playpens and safety gates; children’s plastic plates and spoons, knives and forks; and new baby wipes.

Financial donations allow Roundabout to continue its work; at the start of this year, the charity projected that it would need $1.5 million to meet baseline demand.

And Ms Andrevski expects pressure on families will continue next year.

“My assumption is that fuel prices are still very high; the cost of food is still very high. This housing crisis is not going away anytime soon; there’s no magic solution to that. So I think we’re going to continue to see that need increase.”

But Roundabout will meet that need, with the public’s help.

“We aim to never say no to a family that needs our support,” Ms Andrevski said. “We’re very creative; our community is very responsive.”