SEED - Social Economic Empowerment Department

Our Approach

We lead the system by creating pathways for families to flourish by listening to families and communities and sharing their stories to co-create world leading primary preventative solutions that stop systemic failure.

Discover our Approach

Our Goals

Our ‘One Door’ approach across 1000 days will result in a community which:

  • Nurtures parents so they can nurture their children.
  • Values the caring role of all parents.
  • Invests in parents and children early, recognising when they succeed, our communities do too.
  • Upholds the rights of both parent and child.
  • Harnesses the power of place.
The 10 Year Approach

Our Focus Areas

SEED Futures has been established to obtain real-time, evidence-based community feedback about the impact of current systems and offers prioritised and indexed policy solutions that will drive the most impact for vulnerable people, whilst providing these solutions to governments in a way that helps them to meet the needs. We want to see everyone win.

System

We need to simplify and re-envision the systems that support families.

Prevention

We need people on the ground creating pathways to opportunity.

Funding

We need long-term thinking to fund viable support systems.

Our Advisory Council

We have Australia’s brightest thought leaders and subject matter experts across a range of perspectives.

Meet the Advisory Council

News & Insights

28 - 03 - 23

New appointments in CEO and Ambassador roles

Former World Vision Australia executive and newly appointed CEO, Jill Roche, has been a key contributor to Brave’s operations and strategic planning since joining the organisation as Chief Operating[...]

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SEED - Social Economic Empowerment Department

Where we’ve come from

As a 16-year -old mother, SEED Futures CEO and Founder, Bernadette Black dreamed of a world that valued her and provided pathways enabling her family to thrive. This vision led her to share her own lived experience through her book Brave Little Bear in 2006 and establish Brave Foundation in 2009 to deliver meaningful change for other young parents and their children. Despite early skepticism, Brave Foundation has grown to be Australia’s largest organisation supporting young parents. Please see Bernadette’s Founders note and timeline from start up to national success on the Brave Foundation website here.

Supported by studies in international primary preventative strategies, Bernadette discovered that the experiences of young parents could guide efforts to help all families at risk of entrenched disadvantage, especially during the critical first 1000 days. Without early intervention, these families often face generational poverty, becoming long-term welfare recipients. Between 2009 and 2022, Brave grew to more than 22 staff. Throughout this time, Bernadette was named Tasmanian Australian of the Year 2019, Barnardos Australian Mother of the Year and was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2021.

SEED was launched by Tim Costello AC, as a systemic advocacy initiative, to re-envision how we tackle disadvantage and poverty in young people and families. Bernadette said at the May launch “I have a bold exploratory ten-year end game to establish a central primary prevention mechanism, where lived experience, sectors and governments advise each other in the creation of policy and funding architecture that meets the need when it matters most”. You can read more about the journey from Brave to SEED in this article, written by Philanthropy Australia in October 2023.

In SEED, Bernadette and her team have devised a four-stage, 10-year roadmap to overhaul the social service support system for families across the first 1000 days, creating a place to flourish rather than flounder. SEED aims to see everyone in the ‘system’ win, from lived experience to the authorisers of policy. The SEED team are well on target in meeting their goal with transformation taking deep roots in our systems.

Bernadette often says that her dream is to do herself out of a job, where one day our systems meet the needs of families in timely ways, before entering into disadvantage so that future generations can flourish. Bernadette says “There is a lot of work to do in the next decade. I am now ‘Nana Bebe’ and when I see my 31-year-old son and his family, I return to my ambitious dream from so many years ago – that all families know what it’s like to flourish, to be nurtured and to nurture”.

You can read Bernadette Black’s bio here

READ about us
SEED - Social Economic Empowerment Department

“Prevention is almost always cheaper, almost always more effective and always more humane than repairing.”

Bernadette Black AM, CEO of SEED Futures

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SEED acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands on which we work and live. We also pay respect to the wisdom of our Elders past and present.

 

 

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