Building foundations and tailored support: The heart of your 2025 impact

Reflections on some of the deeper impact your support is creating.

By Shannon Calderoni, Chief Impact & Finance Officer, Baby Give Back.

The quiet relief of being ready 

I spend a lot of time looking at numbers: growth curves, regional distributions and logistics (proud data nerd over here 🙋‍♀️). And in my role leading the impact of Baby Give Back, one of the big "whys" behind the spreadsheets is the person supporting a vulnerable family. It’s the caseworker, the child health nurse, the front-line worker who gives tirelessly to others.

“The strength of our community gives us the power to be proactive. Instead of reacting during an emergency, we can reach out to organisations and ensure they are fully stocked and ready before a crisis even reaches their door.”

Shannon Calderoni, Chief Impact & Finance Officer, Baby Give Back.

These professionals do an incredibly tough job. Standing alongside families during their most vulnerable moments, working on creating hope and lasting change. At Baby Give Back, our mission is to ensure they can wrap a family with community love in difficult times.

When I look back at 2025, the impact our supporters helped us create wasn't just about the physical items we provided. It was about providing a sense of relief and peace of mind for support workers. Equipping them with essential resources to help facilitate meaningful change and impact long-term outcomes for vulnerable children. 

The strength of our community gives us the power to be proactive. Instead of reacting during an emergency, we can reach out to organisations and ensure they are fully stocked and ready before a crisis even reaches their door.

The value of being prepared

A defining pillar of our work in 2025 was strengthening our capacity to respond when things get difficult and to act before a crisis unfolds. Using a place-based approach, it’s our priority to get to know each community and tailor our support to their specific needs.

Over the holiday period, for example, we already had support accessible in Mount Isa before the severe flooding hit. Even though the roads were cut off, the support was already there. We also kept natural disaster stock ready to be activated at our Gold Coast warehouse and with our friends at Foodbank Queensland in Brisbane and Townsville.

Thankfully, that extra stock wasn't needed this time, but having it ready to go is what matters. It means that when a caseworker is facing an uncertain situation, they know the resources are already in place. Now that the roads have reopened, we have even more heading up to Mount Isa this week to keep those local supplies topped up.

Growth through connection

Our proactive efforts are paying off statewide. On the Sunshine Coast, we have grown from helping just a handful of children to reaching hundreds by showing up in the community and building relationships with local health services.

Out in the Darling Downs, we started having support on hand at Dalby Hospital. I recently received a thank you call from one of the nurses. The team had to navigate a really tough situation with a family and she told me that having support on hand really lightened the load. 

Further south in Ipswich, changing how we support local health services has allowed us to triple the amount of clothing we provided to children accessing that community service in 2025.

Up in Townsville, our hub continues to expand. We are now working with 30 partner organisations in the region and we have found that nothing beats face-to-face connection and showing up in person to listen to what the community actually needs.

The impact at home

We’re often told that our support lightens the load for caseworkers, allowing them to return home to their own families without the heavy burden of a client’s unmet needs.

This is the true heart of your impact: you’re not just providing clothes or nappies to families who need it; you’re providing essential resources for the very people who spend their lives catching others. 

Thank you for standing with us in 2025.

Shannon Calderoni
Chief Impact & Finance Officer, Baby Give Back