Roundabout Canberra founder and CEO Hannah Andrevski is the 2024 Canberra Citizen of the Year in recognition of her commitment to supporting families in need.
Ms Andrevski founded Roundabout Canberra in 2018 after trying to find a service where she could donate pre-loved belongings her children no longer needed.
“I’m a very proud and passionate Canberran, having grown up here, and now raising my own family here. I care deeply about our community and want to play a role in making it a better place for all of us to live,” she said.
“It’s a privilege to get to do what I do – to provide much needed support to families in our community in a way that upholds their dignity.”
Roundabout Canberra provides essential baby and children’s items to families in need across the Canberra region. Since the beginning of 2024 alone, the organisation has already helped hundreds of children and gifted thousands of items.
“At the time, I was living in Queanbeyan, I had a young baby and a toddler, and there was a need there for some families who needed support. I used to give stuff away free on Facebook Marketplace or Gumtree,” Hannah told CityNews in a recent interview.
“I just really liked the idea of knowing the items I passed on were going directly to families that needed them.
“I have previously done an arts degree at ANU, and then I went on to do a masters in criminology. I actually worked for the AFP for 10 years, so I’ve always had a strong passion for helping people and doing something good in the community.
“I’d seen some charities around other parts of Australia who do what we do now, and I thought surely something like that could work here.
“Through Roundabout we take donations of secondhand baby and children items. In the early days we were focused on babies but we now take up to size 16 children’s clothing, and then we work with social services and community organisations to pass things on to families or people who need them,” she says.
“Whether it’s public hospitals, women’s refuges, migrant and refugee support services, there is a whole range of people we support, through working with 110 services in and around Canberra.
“Whenever a service is working with a family that needs goods, the service places an online order with us, sort of like a click-and-collect order, and we package up exactly what that particular family needs and the service comes and picks it up and takes it to the family. It’s different for every family.”
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