The event · In the room · Resources · Return to Kiwanis Club of Sydney
These conversations rarely happen in formal settings. They happen at a barbecue, on a road trip, in the moments between everything else.
Image: Dying to Know 2026 campaign, Proveda.
Wednesday
12 August
Preparing for the inevitable — not with fear, but with purpose, care, and a sense of legacy.
When we allow ourselves to accept and talk about death and planning — how much space is created.
The conversations we put off — and the peace they leave behind.
Most people don’t avoid thinking about death because they’re afraid of it. They avoid it because they don’t know where to start. So the will never gets written, the wishes never get said, and the people left behind have to guess.
That guesswork is the hard part — the family who don’t know what you wanted, the decisions made in a hospital corridor, the quiet disagreements about what you would have said. Not because you didn’t care. Only because no one ever asked, and there was never a plan.
Wednesday 12 August is the first in a series of online conversations hosted by the Kiwanis Club of Sydney as part of the national Dying to Know Day campaign, run by Proveda.
The 2026 campaign theme, developed by Proveda, is Nobody Knows — The Secret I’m Glad I Shared. We don’t lecture. We ask the simple questions almost no one gets asked out loud. Do you have a will? Is it current?
If you couldn’t speak for yourself tomorrow, does anyone know what you’d want, and who would decide?
The tone will be honest and human. Practical information, real stories, and space for questions. It won’t be heavy, and it won’t be a lecture. It’s a conversation, held online, that we hope leaves you a little more prepared — and a little less alone with the questions.
What’s your final song?
As part of the 2026 Dying to Know campaign, Proveda is inviting Australians to add the song they’d want played at their farewell to a shared Spotify playlist. Heartfelt, funny, nostalgic, unexpected — whatever it is, it’s a lighter way in to a heavier conversation.
Have a think. Have a listen. Add yours. Then bring it into the room with you on the night, or share it with the people who matter with the hashtag #NowTheyKnow.
This conversation isn’t new to us.
For more than eleven years, our Comfort Care Cases programme has provided comfort resources for children facing the end of life at Sydney Children’s Hospital — supporting families, quietly, through the hardest days they will ever know.
Developed in partnership with the palliative care team at Sydney Children’s Hospital, each case contains small things that let families create meaning and hold on to their child, in the hardest hours a family will ever face. Handprint kits. A camera to preserve memories. Aromatherapy for the room. A blanket, a book, materials to make prints and casts.
That work taught us something we carry into this one: the families who had talked things through and written their wishes down were spared a second layer of pain on top of their grief; the ones who hadn’t were left guessing in the middle of a crisis. Dying to Know brings that lesson upstream — to the everyday conversations that make the unbearable days a little more bearable.
The programme was published in the Journal of Palliative Care in 2019 and is now being adopted by other hospitals and agencies across Australia. In 2025, at the Kiwanis International Convention in Pittsburgh, the Kiwanis Club of Sydney was awarded Second Place in the Signature Project Awards for Comfort Care Cases — peer recognition from the global Kiwanis community. The Sydney club turns 40 this year. Kiwanis International, our parent organisation, is more than a century old.
Support the Comfort Care Cases programme →
Reference: Goymour et al. (2019). Developing the Comfort Care Case: An End-of-Life Resource for Pediatric Patients, Their Families, and Health Professionals. Journal of Palliative Care, 34(3), 197–204. A programme of the Kiwanis Club of Sydney and Sydney Children’s Hospital.
The event is free. Registration takes a minute.
You’ll receive the Zoom link 48 hours before the event, along with a set of free resources from the national Dying to Know Day campaign to explore beforehand.
About the room — and how it’s put together.
Local professionals alongside end-of-life specialists, who share what they know because these conversations matter to them. Each is an established practitioner in their field, personally curated for their fit with the topic they’re speaking to.
They’re here to help you make a start, not to sell you anything. If you later choose to work with one, that’s entirely your call.
A portion of any support the programme receives goes to Kiwanis Club of Sydney’s Comfort Care Cases programme at Sydney Children’s Hospital.
Our family of programs.
Kiwanis Club of Sydney runs three programs that sit alongside each other. Comfort Care Cases walks with families at the end of a child’s life. Terrific Parents helps parents plan for a child who will outlive them. Dying to Know helps the rest of us prepare for our own.
Different rooms, one belief: no one should face the end — or its paperwork — alone.
What comes next.
This first session is deliberately introductory — a broad conversation to open the series. Future sessions will focus on specific territories: wills and estates, protecting your family financially, aged care planning, grief and loss, and the story of a life. Each one another opportunity to make more space in our lives for the conversations that matter. When you register for Wednesday 12 August, we’ll keep you informed of the sessions to come. You’re welcome to attend as many as suit you.
Part of the national Dying to Know Day campaign, run by Proveda. The experts in the room are Sydney-based professionals, personally curated for the conversation.