No Wrong Door: Why Every Family Deserves a Wendy in the First 1,000 Days
Bernadette Black AM, CEO and Founder of SEED Futures, shares her deeply personal journey from teenage motherhood to national systems change advocate. Reflecting on the transformative impact of one woman’s care and belief in her, she makes a powerful case for reimagining the way Australia supports families in their earliest, most vulnerable days. With warmth and urgency, Black argues that kindness must not depend on chance—it must be built into the system. Through SEED Futures and the Incremental Reform Catalogue, she offers a clear, practical path to make that vision real.
The first time I heard of Centrelink, I had just turned sixteen and was newly pregnant. I had no idea what to expect—only that my Auntie knew the system well enough to take me to the office and help me get some forms. I knew immediately that I didn’t want to come back. The atmosphere felt heavy—agitated, uncertain, transactional. I wasn’t sure what I had imagined, but it certainly wasn’t this.
When my son Damien was six weeks old, I returned—this time with every form filled in, and my mum by my side, who had rearranged her workday to come with me. I smiled at people in the queue, hoping to create a sense of warmth, to shift the mood, to feel seen. But no one smiled back. The hours dragged. I juggled a newborn while waiting, feeling exposed and invisible at the same time. The experience left me with a deep sense of depletion—the opposite of what families need to feel during one of the most vulnerable, formative times of their lives.
Another moment stands out just as vividly: my first time catching a bus with Damien and his pram. I assumed the bus driver would help me lift the pram up the steps. He didn’t. Instead, he said something so demeaning I still won’t repeat it today. That moment almost broke me.
I was on my way to a Neighbourhood House—what we now call a place-based support hub—to ask how I might finish my VCE. By the time I arrived, I was emotionally spent. I don’t know how I made it there, to be honest. But I did. And Wendy was waiting for me.
Wendy didn’t ask questions about why I was there. She made me a cup of tea, offered to cuddle my baby, and calmly explained how I could still finish school despite being underage. She helped me enrol in Year 11, find onsite childcare, and set a start date. With her warmth and belief in me, a door opened—one that changed everything. Wendy ensured that from that point forward, I wouldn’t encounter a “wrong door” again—only the “next right one.”
I completed my VCE at that Neighbourhood House. Later, I went on to study nursing, then social policy, entrepreneurship, and systems thinking at Harvard’s Kennedy School. My vision? To help reimagine the systems that support families, so primary prevention becomes embedded in how Australia governs—not just something we talk about when things go wrong.
Because here’s the truth: not every young mother meets a Wendy. And that fact haunts me. Thousands of parents and children in their first 1,000 days—pregnancy to age two—reach out for help, and find a closed door, a cold system, or no response at all. They are doing everything they can to do a good job, to keep going, to hope. And too often, our system makes it harder than it needs to be.
Over the past 20 years, and especially in the last three through SEED Futures, I’ve worked alongside hundreds of people—families, practitioners, policymakers, researchers—who are just as committed to ensuring no one is left to navigate these early years alone. But this commitment must become structural, not just personal. It can’t rely on the luck of meeting a Wendy.
This is why we developed the Incremental Reform Catalogue—a practical tool to help governments and communities shift policy and practice step by step, informed by lived experience and designed to support real people in real places. It’s also why I’ve advocated for a National Primary Preventative Framework (NPPF)—a whole-of-government strategy to ensure the earliest years of life are met with coordinated, universal, culturally safe supports.
Bernadette Black
My story of teenage pregnancy was last century. But the challenges facing families in the first 1,000 days have only compounded. Cost of living, childcare gaps, service fragmentation, cultural exclusion—these are not isolated problems. They are structural, and they are solvable. But only if we act with urgency, care, and coordination.
I co-author this work as a systems and policy entrepreneur with lived experience—and as a mother who knows how transformative a single act of care can be. But we need more than acts of kindness. We need systems of support that are kind by design.
I have a dream: that Australia becomes the best place in the world to grow up—and to grow into parenthood. That every family, no matter their postcode, culture, or story, can access the right help at the right time. That no door is the wrong one—and that, like Wendy, our systems know how to welcome people in.
This is the Australia I believe in. And this is the roadmap we now hold in our hands.
Republished with permission from the author.
Moderator: Megan Lang