About

Every genuinely good person we found — the speech pathologist who was patient, the OT who understood, the paediatrician who listened — came from another parent. Never from a directory. Never from a search.

And I watched the same thing happen in every conversation I had: someone asks who you see, and someone else writes the name down. That’s the real system. It’s just been trapped in Facebook groups and school gate conversations where the next parent can’t find it.

So Benji’s Mum isn’t trying to be a better search engine. There are already directories with tens of thousands of listings, and they haven’t solved this — because the problem was never how many providers exist. It’s that you have no way of knowing which ones will be right for your kid.

This is one list, for autistic and disabled kids, starting in Sydney, where every name got there because a parent put it there.

Benji is my son. For a long time that’s how I was known at appointments, at school, in waiting rooms — Benji’s mum. I used to find it strange. Now it seems like exactly the right name for something built by a parent, for parents.

Providers pay a subscription to be listed. Parents pay nothing, ever, and providers can never pay for a recommendation or a better position. I’d rather say that on the first page than have you wonder.

The full explanation, including what we check and what we don’t