The Juliette Awards

Every day, week, month and year, ACA NSW has the privilege of working with all of its members to address and solve the many challenges facing early childhood education and care services. Such collaborations are invaluable and fundamental to ACA NSW's mission so as to serve members and their services' children, educators, teachers and families, and of course the whole of our sector.

But from time to time, ACA NSW works with very special members whose unique gifts and experiences that have such significant positive impact on the early childhood education and care sector. The Juliette Awards have been inspired to recognise their outstanding contributions and outcomes.

Mel & Ben Cooper, mi kids (Warriewood, NSW)

The inherent unfair distribution of Start Strong funding in NSW since 2014 was finally "addressed" by December 2022 through the new Federal Government and NSW Government's Preschool Funding Agreement. However, due to the lack of dynamic data sharing between the two tiers of government, the distribution of the new funds became a new problem for long daycare services. Thanks to Ben & Melissa Cooper of mi kids (Warriewood NSW), their detailed and very persuasive financial analyses that ACA NSW used were inarguably crucial in ACA NSW's advocacy with the NSW Department of Education's decision to skew 75% of the funding in the first quarter (instead of 25% per quarter) for all services. For the many millions of reasons, thank you mi kids for your help!!!

Juliette Pantaleo, Organic Seedlings (Edmonson Park, NSW)

The COVID pandemic years (2020-2021) were indeed scary. Like the rest of Australia and the world, confusion and anticipation of the worst was rife. And keeping children safe and early childhood education and care services afloat were some of ACA NSW's biggest challenges. Hence, ACA NSW is extremely grateful to Juliette Pantaleo (second from right) and her amazing Organic Seedlings (Edmonson Park NSW) service's team who helped ACA NSW and our sector to present some of the vital information the Federal Minister for Education needed that led to the Federal Government's implementation of the Business Continuity Payments for all eligible ECEC services. Thank you Organic Seedlings!

LAST UPDATED: 20 JUNE 2023

FIRST PUBLISHED: 21 DECEMBER 2021