On May 1st, 2025, the Drought Ready Facebook community came together for our May Community Café, and the focus was one we’re all passionate about: youth engagement.
This session was all about spotlighting the incredible work happening with young people across Australia and exploring how we can all step up to support the next generation in meaningful, practical ways. Whether you’re working in agriculture, education, health, or community development, engaging young people is essential to creating resilient towns and industries.
In my breakout group, some great tips were shared:
- Make it affordable. Ensure programs are financially accessible to all young people, and their families.
- Create emotional safety. Make space where they feel genuinely supported and safe.
- Let them experiment. Support young people to try new things, without fear of failure.
- Go where they already are. Show up at their events and activities, not just your own.
- Keep expectations realistic. For example, not every initiative can afford to consistently pay youth for their input; plan accordingly.
- Listen, then act. If you’re asking for advice or feedback, use it. Young people can tell when you’re just ticking boxes.
- Support their dreams. Whether they want to stay in their community or chase their goals and dreams elsewhere, back them.
- Shift the narrative. Young people “at risk” are not a threat, they’re a shared responsibility and an opportunity for care.
One major takeaway? Look to what’s already working. Learn from programs already making a difference. Shadow them. Volunteer. Get inspired. Thanks to the two Cafe special guests and attendees, there’s quite a list of exciting projects/programs to share!
Mentoring school students
Special guest speaker Karen Strange, one of the co-founders of Wheatbelt & Beyond Youth Mentoring, a NFP organisation providing school-based mentorship for rural and remote high school students in Western Australia.
As Karen explained to the group, Western Australia’s Wheatbelt is double the size of Tasmania but only has 21 district high schools and only three educational sites that provide classes up to year 12, which leaves huge travel and other barriers for students when it comes to completing their education.
Enter the dedicated local group, and their band of volunteer mentors sourced from universities and other established rural and urban community service groups. Each mentor is assigned a mentee, and they communicate primarily by email but also meet at an annual camp and come together for career expos, and health & wellbeing initiatives.
The team currently has 150 mentors and 200 current mentees, and they continue to grow their offerings. They recently joined the Governor’s Sparks of the Future program, a program helping selected Year Six students undertake events and activities to help their development as young leaders, and to provide them with opportunities and experiences that may not otherwise be available to them.
Look for funding ops
The sessions next special guest speaker was Lauren Ryan, the Youth Program Manager driving the Vincent Fairfax Foundation and FRRR’s Backing the Future program.
This program provides one-off grants to support projects benefiting young people in Queensland and NSW, and specifically supports communities outside of capital cities. Lauren also stressed they like to see young people applying.
Lauren shared some of the successful projects previously funded, including:
- young engineer Jameson Harvey who founded Red Dirt Robotics with a vision to bring hands-on, innovative STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) experiences to young people in remote, rural and regional Australia, read more. The funding for a Queensland-based project allowed Jameson to demonstrate proof-of-concept for the approach to introduce robotics to rural students
- Cal Champagne, who is 2023 founded Grow The Future in the Bega Valley, to give young people a chance for paid employment, recognised training and education in horticulture and business, and land regeneration work, read more.
Amazing range of projects
There were some very exciting people and projects who took part in the community cafe, and while the Cafes are deliberately not recorded, Claire from the ARLF compiled a list of projects you can check out!
- The Blokehood Project – a WA-based project that aims to guide and empower young men.
- WA Governor’s Sparks of the Future program – inspiring leadership from Year 6 up.
- University of Notre Dame Australia Wheatbelt medical student immersion program – as part of their university curriculum, up to 200 medical students from Western Australian universities spend four days in towns across the Wheatbelt to learn about rural life.
- Kangaroo Island Study Hub – providing a space for students to continue their education, in their home community
- Youth Agritech and Job Expo – the East Gippsland Shire Council is developing the event, to be held in Bairnsdale (Victoria) in September 2025.
- Hervey Bay Neighbourhood Centre – check out the video with Tanya Stevenson in this post, about her organisation’s many projects, including youth engagement.
Don’t forget the expertise pool
Karen from the Wheatbelt Mentoring project gave a special shout out to the FRRR Expertise Pool. Run by the Social Impact Hub, the FRRR Expertise Pool offers a range of professional skills, sector expertise, specialist advice and support to enable community organisations to deliver place-based projects – from leadership training and capability building workshops to networking events and small-scale infrastructure initiatives. It is open to all Australian-based community and social purpose organisations.
The Future is Already Here
Last week’s Café proved what many of us already know: young people aren’t just the future, they’re leading it now.
With the right support, opportunities, and respect, they’re ready to transform their communities. So let’s keep showing up, listening deeply, and walking alongside them.
Got a youth-focused project to share? Jump into the Facebook group and tell us about it.
Need some advice or a sounding board? Jump into the Facebook group and ask!
Lisa Yorkston 