Aboriginal mothers and babies are best supported by their communities. The system's job is to make that support visible, sustainable, and properly resourced — not to replace it.
The actual care of Aboriginal mothers and babies happens across community, family, Elders, peer workers, and clinical services — together. When the system can't see this network, it under-supports it. Worse, it sometimes works against it.
A non-Aboriginal maternal-health system tends to draw a line around the patient, the clinician, and the encounter. Everything else — Elders, aunties, peer workers, community organisations — sits outside that line, treated as informal context rather than active care.
But for Aboriginal families, the people outside that line are often the ones doing the watching, the recognising, the carrying of risk, and the making of the call. The community is the care system. The clinical service supplements it; it doesn't replace it.
Configuration question: who is the system designed to support? If the answer is only the individual mother, the system is missing most of what actually keeps mothers and babies well. The Community persona — recognised, resourced, partnered with — is not optional.
Growin' Up Healthy Babies is being designed in partnership with Aboriginal community partners, Aboriginal community-controlled health organisations, and clinical services. The configuration distributes the four operations across the actual network of care — not just clinician and consumer.
Noticing happened in clinical encounters — months apart. The day-to-day signals visible to Elders, aunties, family, peer workers were not part of the system's view.
Noticing is distributed: community workers, peer supports, family, and clinical services all see and share signals — within governance frameworks the community defines.
Pattern recognition was held by the clinical service alone, working from snapshots. Important context — cultural, social, family — sat outside the clinician's view.
Recognition is shared across the network. The clinical service brings clinical knowledge; the community brings cultural knowledge, family context, and continuity. Both are required.
Risk was carried clinically — and informally by family, Elders, peer workers, who held it without recognition or resourcing.
Risk-carrying is distributed and resourced. Community organisations and peer workers are recognised and supported as risk-bearing actors, not informal volunteers.
Decisions were made in clinical settings, sometimes with consultation, often without. Family and community input was treated as advisory rather than co-equal.
Decisions land where they belong — sometimes clinical, sometimes community-led, often co-decided. The configuration reflects how care actually works in Aboriginal communities.
Growin' Up Healthy Babies is in active community partnership and co-design. Aboriginal community partners hold the lead role in shaping the configuration. The Sandpit's role is to support — to bring the design method, the workbench, and the live-environment infrastructure — not to direct.
All work is governed by Aboriginal Data Sovereignty principles, the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, and the partnership protocols agreed with each Aboriginal community-controlled organisation. Data, decisions, and design authority sit with community.
Growin' Up Healthy Babies is in early community partnership phase. Outcomes will be defined in partnership with Aboriginal community partners. Where outcomes are reported, they are reported with the partners' approval and in their framing.
When the four operations are decomposed honestly, the Community is not a backdrop — it is an actor. The Sandpit's job is to make that visible to a system that has been designed to look past it.
Each Sandpit configuration applies the same four-operation decomposition to a different capacity problem. What stays constant is the method.
Bring it to the Sandpit. We'll diagnose where capacity is lost, configure what should change, and test it in a governed live setting before you commit at scale.