About the Program

What makes Kids’ Own Publishing and this book launch so special is the work and the impact leading up to this event. 

Eight weeks before the book launch, 23 9 and 10-year-old students from Aldercourt Primary School met Thomas McCammon and Nicky Tsekouras from the Kids Own Publishing team for the first time. Both Thomas and Nicky are talented artists who spent time with the kids, getting to know them, and helping them develop and bring their ideas to life. 

In the first week, the kids created one-page zines and mini books to introduce them to the program. During this exercise, Thomas reflected that the ideas and concepts that the kids came up with were highly factual, non-fiction ideas based on things they had learned in school. 

Stories of Impact

The program also had some remarkable stories of impact:

• Increased Imaginative Play: The validation and collaborative spirit saw increased creative thinking as early as Weeks 2 and 3, as students felt more open to sharing and exploring new ideas.
• Engaging Disengaged Students: One child with high special needs, typically disengaged, became actively involved after peers encouraged him to design a Spanish-speaking duck, drawing on his Spanish language skills and writing dialogue for the character. Creativity is a powerful force for engaging young people who may have checked out of, or cannot participate fully in, traditional learning. 
• Leveraging Unique Talents: Another previously disengaged student found renewed engagement when classmates recognised his exceptional talent for detailed illustrations, enlisting him to create intricate duck body parts for the book. Every young person is unique and creativity is one of the best ways for celebrating and unlocking potential in all its wonderful forms in unexpected ways.
• A Greater Understanding of the Power of Creativity: The Kids’ Own Publishing team shared that throughout the program, they had noticed a greater understanding and appreciation of the power of creativity from the teachers and staff at Aldercourt Primary School. 

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Thomas highlighted that while the Kids’ Own Publishing team guided them, the students independently decided on their story, distributed tasks, and organised themselves with very little assistance, demonstrating the high agency that students had in their learning and exploring their creativity.

"We're really grateful for Blackbird Foundation's support for this project at Aldercourt Primary. Thank you to Theia for making it down to the launch too.The authors of this project are really proud of their travelling-duck story, and just last week, they visited the main Frankston North Library to see copies of A Quack in Time catalogued and featured in the Children's literature section." ~ Thomas McCammon

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The act of writing their own story, illustrating it and seeing it published and displayed in the Frankston North Library has helped shape the children’s identity so that they now see themselves as creators, illustrators and authors. 

For me personally, watching those kids step into the roles of authors and illustrators – and seeing how proud they were to share something that came entirely from their own imaginations – was a reminder of how powerful creativity can be when it’s taken seriously. When young people are given space, belief, and the right kind of support, they show us just how expansive their worlds can be.

It’s moments like these that make working at Blackbird Foundation so full of wonder and magic. We get to back people who don’t just work for young people, but with young people. And it's a privilege to back Believers who hand over the mic to young people and say, “Your turn.” 

That kind of belief is rare; it’s precisely what the world needs more of – and what we are trying to spread and amplify through our work.