How your kindness showed up in a pool in the Pilbara

When you run the swimming pool in a remote town, you get to know the local kids well. That was Kristy Brown’s role for three years in Marble Bar, a remote town in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.
A Frontier Services story from the May 2025 edition of Frontier News.

When you run the swimming pool in a remote town, you get to know the local kids well. That was Kristy Brown’s role for three years in Marble Bar, a remote town in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The town sits alongside the First Nations community of Binya, and Kristy regularly sees many children from Binya at the pool.

“In the three years I’ve been there, I have become very close with the kids in the community,” Kristy shares. “I was aware of the need to guide and support these kids as they grow up.”

A safe yarning place

Kristy realised many of the children were having a hard time and that this would continue if they didn’t learn vital life skills. “Things like managing money and savings. Things like healthy eating, personal hygiene, even computer skills.”

This is when your care showed up through Bush Chaplain David Jackson. Kristy explained her passion for supporting these children, and together, they started what is now the Marble Bar Youth Project.

Thanks to your support, David and Kristy could create a safe space for young people to come together for learning, connection, and community.

“They call it yarning, where they tell stories, so I wanted a safe yarning place for them,” Kristy explains. “A program where the kids could learn life and work skills. So when they do leave Marble Bar, they’re able to join the workforce and be confident.”

Alongside storytelling, the Marble Bar program includes learning to sew, write comic books, grow veggies, and connecting with the children’s culture through Language and cooking. The children are also learning leadership skills.

Your support is needed

Kristy’s goal for the future is that the program would be owned and led by the community.

Yet funding challenges threaten its future. Kristy no longer lives in Marble Bar, so she travels there every fortnight. She’d love to go weekly, but with the round-trip costing around $150 in fuel, it’s simply out of reach.

Ongoing funding is also needed for project resources such as materials for arts and crafts, ingredients for cooking, and food for shared mealtimes.

David and Kristy are determined to share how this work you support can have a life-changing impact: “If we can prove to everybody just how great this program is, maybe in the future we can get a little bit more funding.” So together, through this program, you can nurture and grow the next generation of leaders.

To support Bush Chaplain David’s work and pass on your care to the children of Marble Bar and Binya go to frontierservices.org/donate

Read more about the work of Frontier Services in Frontier News