Excellence Award for Inclusion and Disability 2025 Cubby House Toy Library

EarlyEd’s Cubby House Toy Library is thrilled to announced that it has been awarded the Toy Libraries Australia 2025 Excellence Award for Inclusion and Diversity! 

We are greatly honoured to accept this award. It acknowledges Cubby House Toy Library’s commitment to its vision that: 

“Children of all abilities thrive with their families in inclusive communities.” 

Cubby House Toy Library has created an inclusive community for families, children, community groups and community members across the Sydney North Shore and Northern Beaches area.

Acknowledging the Cubby House Toy Library 45 years of inclusion.

The award acknowledges the way: 

• all toy library members (the children and families) and
• our amazing volunteers 

past and present, as well as 

• the team 
• our valued donors and supporters
• and local Councils

have worked together for over 45 years to provide equity of access to play and learning to all children across its local areas. 

Inclusion results from a commitment to best practice 

EarlyEd’s Cubby House Toy Library has become a service where you can borrow a huge range of toys to suit any child’s developmental needs, ask for advice about your child’s development and connection to community services. In the last 4 years our team has been working hard to find ways to extend our reach to support more families.

Our child safe and effective toy library services, are ably managed by our toy library manager, Sandra Gillet, and backed up by our peak body Toy Libraries Australia,

Quality approaches in children’s learning supports make use of EarlyEd’s experienced educators and allied health practitioners funded through Start Strong Pathways, Department of Education, NSW.

Best practice approaches to volunteering are overseen by Volunteer Coordinator, Jenny Donoghue.

Celebrating our Volunteers and Partners

Our amazing diverse team of volunteers aged from 16 to 80 years, our group of young adults with a disability from Up and Over, and student volunteers, work diligently alongside the Cubby House staff members to strive for our vision for an inclusive toy library community. 

They offer browsing & borrowing and Click and Collect services at our base at Forestville on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. 

Thanks to innovative approaches during COVID, the ongoing involvement of Northern Beaches Council and local grant funding, two years ago we were able to establish new Click & Collect sites to help busy families and reduce their time travelling. Each week our volunteers drive bags of ordered toys for families to St Ives, Manly, Mona Vale and North Sydney and bring all the toys back, having increased our reach with the support from Ku-ring-gai and North Sydney Councils.

Last year Toy Libraries Australia acknowledged our volunteers and awarded Leonie Knowles as Volunteer of the Year 2024!

Long History – Strong Foundations

The Northern Beaches community established the Cubby House Toy Library 45 years ago. The International Year of the Child had drawn attention to the gaps in support particularly for children with developmental delays and children with disability. This early toy library proved valuable to the community, attracting new funding so it could start offering free appointments with an occupational therapist. These sessions provided advice families about the toys to borrow and how to use them to support their child’s development. 

The roll out of National Disability Insurance Scheme saw the loss of this funding. It  nearly led to the toy library’s closure in 2015. On hearing about the threat to the toy libraries ongoing existence, local early childhood intervention service, EarlyEd, recognising the toy library’s importance in the community took on the library assets and kept the program operating.  As the NSW Department of Ageing Disability and Home Care withdrew all its funding for not-for-profit child and family disability services all free services such as the community occupational therapy services ceased. This left a gap in free readily accessible local community early childhood intervention services that still remains over 10 years later.

The toys are still available but capacity building support for parents is no longer available in the local community. The NSW Department of Education Start Strong Pathways, has maintained the toy libraries opening hours. The toys provides opportunities for early education experiences from a child’s first and most important teachers (their parents and families) from an early age. 

If you just want some advice from an occupational therapist about whether you should be concerned about your child’s development or how to help you child be more confident to try a game or activity, this is no longer available without having to go through the processes involved in a NDIS pathway and waiting for contact. 

The Independent NDIS Review, December 2023, identified the significant impact of the loss of these early informal and more targeted supports on family wellbeing and child development outcomes. Hopefully, the coming of the recommended for Foundational Supports will reinvigorate what is remaining of the early childhood interventions community supports like toy libraries and help children access free supports easily and early in their lives.

Building our capacity for inclusion

This award is more than just recognition, as it will encourage us in our endeavours to grow and maintain our inclusive practices and value the diversity of the team and services we offer now and will in the future.  

Make sure you follow us on social media – Facebook or Instagram and join up to receive our Newsletter so you can keep up to date as we are about to roll out some new projects.