Your Market shop supports life-saving equipment for babies
*Note – Trigger warning for infant loss.
Sourdough. Blueberries. A cup of coffee. Not the things you’d immediately connect to a machine that helps a premature baby breathe. And yet, thanks to a chain of connections that runs from a Saturday morning at the Market all the way to The Canberra Hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, that’s exactly what your visits to the Market helped make possible. This is the story of four monitors, four partners, and one very well-run marathon.
The equipment, and why it matters
Premature babies are born with immature lungs and often need respiratory support for weeks or months after birth. Getting the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide exactly right is critical: too much or too little of either can lead to brain damage, lung damage or blindness.
Non-invasive monitors that continuously measure a baby’s oxygenation and ventilation are the tools that help clinicians get that balance right, without the discomfort of more invasive alternatives. But each non-invasive monitor costs approximately $25,000.
One request, four partners, four monitors
In August 2025, Rotary Club of Canberra reached out to Rotary Club of Hall (the Market’s founding organisation) with a request from the Newborn Intensive Care Foundation to help fund four of these monitors for The Canberra Hospital.
What happened next is a genuine community collaboration in action:
- Rotary Club of Hall contributed $10,000.
- Rotary Club of Canberra and other district Rotary Clubs contributed the remaining $14,990 to fund the first monitor.
- The Newborn Intensive Care Foundation funded two more monitors themselves.
- Running for Premature Babies, a national premature-baby charity, funded the fourth.
Four monitors, four partners, all contributing to the same goal: giving Canberra and region’s smallest patients the best possible start.
The marathon connection
The story of how Running for Premature Babies came to be part of the collaboration is worth a mention on its own. Our Market Operations Manager, Sarah Power, is a keen runner, and has taken things to new heights raising over $12,000 for Running for Premature Babies across the Sydney Marathon in 2025 and again in 2026.
Sarah’s personal connection to Running for Premature Babies is what enabled Rotary Club of Hall to introduce the charity to the Newborn Intensive Care Foundation. That introduction is what led to one of the monitors being funded.
Marathons, market stalls, hospital wards. It turns out genuine community connection and the help that it brings can happen anywhere.
Where your Saturday shop fits in
Every Saturday you shop at the Capital Region Farmers Market, you’re doing more than just filling a basket with beautiful produce. Every dollar spent at the Market flows back to the Rotary Club of Hall, which turns it into funding for community and humanitarian projects like this one.
Four life-saving monitors for Canberra’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Made possible in part by the fresh loaf of sourdough you bought last Saturday, the punnet of blueberries, the coffee, the pasta, the cheese. All of it, not only supporting local farms and producers, but all connecting to something bigger than the sum of its parts.
This is what produce with purpose really looks like.
