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As a musician, James' livelihood and future have been thrown into limbo during the pandemic. He sees an opportunity to shape our future economy and society in a way that better addresses disadvantage.
Even before COVID-19 young people were facing an uncertain future. Many of those hardest hit by the pandemic have been young people already experiencing poor mental health, discrimination, homelessness, and unemployment. And, we haven’t even seen the full extent of the recession yet.
But, COVID-19 also presents an opportunity to transform the role of young people in our systems and institutions. It’s an opportunity to shape our future economy and society in a way that better addresses disadvantages and meets our long-term aspirations.
The fund was designed to help provide new and existing youth-led initiatives, movements, and campaigns with grants essential to ensuring their continued work alleviating the impact of COVID-19 on young people.
We pooled more than $1650,000 to inject funds into 15 youth-led initiatives tackling key challenges created and exacerbated by the pandemic.
FYA will continue to support those initiatives funded by providing access to weekly online capacity-building workshops, strategic planning sessions, storytelling opportunities, business resources, and networks of potential collaborators.
Meet the recipientsThe Local and Vocal campaign was launched to support young people aged 16-29 across the country to share the impact COVID-19 has had on their living, learning, and working with decision-makers ahead of the Federal Budget.
Culminating in two weeks of action from the 22 to 31 July, the program focussed on helping to build participants’ capacity and confidence in meeting with their MP, sharing their experiences and putting forward their own ideas. We delivered weekly webinars, a two-hour government and media relations 101 training day, and created 151 electorate fact sheets to help participants put their experiences into context.
We supported more than 90 young people across over 30 Federal electorates to meet virtually with and share their experiences of COVID-19 with their local members of parliament. 82% of our participants had never met with their Federal Member of Parliament before Local and Vocal.
Download the Fact SheetsThe media centre focussed on placing youth organisations and young people into mainstream media opportunities to ensure their perspectives, lived experience, and contributions to recovery are part of the narrative about COVID-19 and its impact on Australia. The broader aim of the media centre was to shift the needle on how young people are represented broadly, moving them from the periphery of stories and news coverage to the centre.
We supported 48 young people across Australia into 35 placements across print, digital, radio, and television, providing media training, briefing, op-ed writing and editing support, debriefing, and relationship building.
The media centre continues to support young people across Australia into media placements, develop their media skills and expand their media literacy.
Read the stories
