As well as supporting the interests of its members, CTA NSW is a long-renowned fund-raiser for children’s hospitals. Beginning in 1906, CTA NSW initiated a Cot Fund movement to finance running costs at the new infant’s hospital in Sydney commencing a proud history of more than a century of philanthropic partnership, firstly with the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children in Camperdown, relocated in 1995 and now known as The Children’s Hospital at Westmead.

William Doyne, a regular commercial traveller to the rural town of Cootamundra, started raising money for sick children by encouraging other travellers to part with their small change, but the success was so quick that formal funds were established to properly manage the giving. Following Doyne’s establishment in 1907 of the Southern and South Coast Travellers’ Cot Fund, further regional organisations were formed across the state: The Western Travellers’ Cot Fund, Northern Travellers’ Cot Fund, and North Coast Travellers’ Cot Fund, all in 1917, followed by the City Commercial Travellers’ Association Club Cot Fund in 1941, and Newcastle District Travellers’ Cot Fund in 1961. These six separate bodies were amalgamated into the Commercial Travellers Cot Fund in 1991. 

This was a time when increasing concern among doctors and other health professionals, as well as civic leaders that not enough was being done to care for sick children. Medical, public health and nursing advances in the late nineteenth century had also impelled greater desire to ensure the youngest sick could benefit from new understandings of care, sanitation and medicines. These advances also increased considerably the costs of providing infant care at a time when hospitals relied almost solely on charitable donations. Governments in Australia were not seriously involved in hospital funding until the 1920s. Already, churches had been at the forefront of fund-raising with the Hospital Sunday movement (beginning in Scotland in the eighteenth century, but which became a commonplace across the UK and Ireland once emerging in Birmingham in 1859), where one Sunday’s pew offerings, simultaneously collected in all denominational services that day, were devoted to the local hospital. But as needs grew, street fairs and carnivals widened the net of philanthropy beyond church offertories on designated Sundays into Hospital Saturdays where business owners and trade union members made fund-raising efforts. In NSW, regional carnivals became the principal means by which CTA undertook fund-raising for its Cot Fund, supplemented by charity picnic days, sporting competitions, and raffles.

The CTA’s Cot Fund movement was a direct response to the 1904 State Royal Commission on the Decline of the Birthrate and on the Mortality of Infants in NSW. Through its Cot Fund initiative, the CTA took the position in response to the Commission's findings that all efforts should be made to keep alive and healthy those born. This community response took up the cause of facilitating the establishment of Sydney’s first hospital dedicated to infant care, the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children, Sydney (1907) and was reflected in other contemporaneous endeavours such as the establishment in 1905 of the Sydney Day Nursery Association (the first child-care centres in NSW), similarly motivated to care for living infants. 

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