Telethon Kids Institute and Minderoo Foundation established CoLab in 2017 to provide a ‘nest’ to bring together evidence with policy and practice to grow six major projects.
These flagship projects, with support from our partners, focused on the urgent need to use early childhood research evidence to:
- Raise the Australian community’s awareness of the importance of early childhood using unified national early childhood messaging (Flagship Project 1 - The Core Story Project)
- Improve parents’ and other carers’ competence and confidence to proactively support their children’s brain development and early learning with personalised encouragement in the palm of their hands (Flagship Project 2 - The Bright Tomorrows App)
- Enable easy access to geo-spatial, real-time linked data to improve the precision of community decision making to improve early childhood development. (Flagship Project 3 - The Child Development Atlas)
- Enhance policy makers’ access to and capacity to use early childhood return on investment data to increase the effective use of scarce resources to support the health, development and early learning of children. (Flagship Project 4 - The Return on Early Childhood Investment project)
- Build cross-sector (particularly health and early learning) policy and practice capacity by providing access to the latest cutting-edge evidence summaries via publications, seminar programs, e-learning resources and capacity building toolkits. (Flagship Project 5 – The CoLab Policy and Practice Evidence Hub)
- Find new ways to work with communities to improve the health, development and learning of all young children and especially those who need it the most, through a partnership between philanthropy, government, and researchers. (Flagship Project 6 - The Early Years Initiative)
Minderoo Foundation provided funding over a three-year period to complete the development of these potentially high-risk yet high-return flagship projects. Each of these projects have evolved and gathered their own significant momentum, co-designed and co-developed with groups of CoLab’s partners and the community. Individually and collectively these projects have the potential to make a significant contribution to improving the health, development and learning of Australia’s children.
This progress meant there was no longer a need for the CoLab brand and it was retired at the end of 2020. But the important outcomes made possible and generated by this collaboration continue.
Telethon Kids Institute will continue in its role as the evidence partner to these projects and driving their community-wide evaluation, while Minderoo Foundation will focus on growing advocacy for policy change to build a world class early learning and development system for Australia.
While the CoLab brand is no longer required, we will continue to work tirelessly and collaboratively to ensure that every child in Australia thrives.