Last Thursday, July 24th, our Early Start Australia Hawthorn clinic opened its door to our community stakeholders.

We hosted an open morning, welcoming a mix of community stakeholders including support coordinators, medical professionals, and educators.

It was a chance to slow down, open our doors, and share a little more about what goes on inside our clinic walls.

From 10am, the centre set and ready with balloons, conversations, questions, and of course, cupcakes!

Our goal was simple: to give our visitors a clear picture of the services we offer, how we can help, what we’re good at, and meet our local community members.

From our connection to the community sessions we run, our in-clinic sessions, the families we see and the services we offer, the team walked our guests through our clinic and discussed what we do.

We detailed more on our early intervention programs: the Little Oaks program and our Community program.

Programs where we support children in their early years (0-5) with tailored approaches in speech, occupational therapy, psychology, behaviour support and education using the Early Start Denver Model as our basis of therapy – and it’s something we’re really proud of!

Our team was out and about, chatting with guests and sharing insights.

Lily Larence (Speech Pathologist), Heather Min (Teacher), Shannon Weatherall (OT Lead), Sheila Jiao (Teacher and Program Coordinator), Lara Laznitski (Speech Pathologist & Victorian Regional Manager), and myself, Shaun Connelly (Early Intervention Lead), were all on hand to answer questions and talk through how we support families in the Boroondara and surrounding areas.

One of the highlights of the morning was welcoming Maisy and her team from Early Years Phoenix Park Kinder.

They took time out of their busy day to visit us, and it was great to reconnect after recently working together to screen around 60 of their students in communication and OT skills.

Their commitment to early outcomes for their students is something we really admire, and we can’t wait to see how we can continue to build on our relationship.

Events like this remind us why we do what we do.

It’s not just about delivering services—it’s about building relationships, sharing knowledge, and learning from each other.

Hearing directly from teachers about the challenges they face and the supports they need helps us grow as practitioners.

Being able to show them how we work, what our programs look like in action, and how we can collaborate more closely in future really grounds us in the work we do.

That’s the kind of connection that makes a real difference.

Thanks to everyone who joined us—it was a lovely morning, and we’re already looking forward to the next one.