K+C Village began in 2009 as kids and community, guided by a simple belief that children grow best through connection with their families, their peers, and the communities around them, and by being part of the communities around them.
From the beginning, our vision was to work alongside families to support children and young people to participate in the everyday experiences that shape our lives. Kids &Community was founded with the desire to do things differently. We believe services for children and families could be more accessible, more responsive, and more connected to the realities of everyday life, with the goal of inclusion and participation in community alongside peers. Our aim was to challenge traditional service models and build something truly child and family focused, community-minded, and responsive to real need.
We started with small beginnings as a team of two, with our founder and director as the sole occupational therapist, assisted by an OT student working as a therapy assistant. As families found their way to us, our team and our work naturally grew. Today, K+C Village is a vibrant team of therapists, therapy assistants, inclusion coaches, and support staff working alongside children, teenagers, and young adults and their families. At its heart, K+C Village has always been built on the simple idea that supporting children and teens well means supporting the people, environments, and relationships around them, and that belief continues to guide everything we do today.
Rather than fitting kids, young adults, and teens into a one-size-fits-all service model, we work with families to co-pilot and build supports around each child or young person according to their interests, goals, strengths, and priorities. Families bring the deep knowledge of their child, and we bring an occupation focus and evidence from practise. Together, we design supports that make sense and support kids and teens to be, become, and belong.
As kids and community has grown, so too has our vision of what supporting children and families can look like. In the early years, kids and community focused primarily on early intervention, providing occupational therapy services to young children and their families. As our team expanded and the skills within our team diversified, we became increasingly responsive to the evolving needs of the families and the kids and families we supported. Peer programmes grew, new service models emerged, and we began to build programmes that sat alongside traditional therapy that were community-driven and co-designed with families and, more recently, with teens and young people. We developed community inclusion supports, expanded peer-based programmes, and created new opportunities for children and young people to build independence and confidence in real-world environments.
Over time, kids and community grew with the community around us, evolving from just an early intervention service into a service supporting children and young people across a broader age range, supporting transitions from first days in out-of-home care in an early childhood education and care programme into transitioning from school and into that ever-important first job. We now support the full spectrum of ages, from little kids right up to teenagers and young adults, while still retaining and evolving those very important early supports for little kids and families in the early days. We have also deepened our partnership with families, the kids themselves, educators, and community organisations so that kids and young people could be afforded in the environments where they live, play, learn, and earn. This evolution saw a move from kids and community to K&C Village, a connected system of services, programmes, and partnerships designed to strengthen supports around a child, young person, or young adult and families, while also strengthening the capacity of communities to create and maintain inclusive environments.