Human Potential and Young People

This theme of work began with a roundtable on “Realising human Potential” in 2002 and under the leadership of Australia 21 Fellow, Richard Eckersley. Two projects are complete and a third is currently under discussion.

Project 1.1: Pathways to success and wellbeing for Australia’s young people. (Now complete)

Project 1.2: Pathways to the preferred futures of young Australians. (Now complete)

Project 1.3: Cultural continuity and indigenous wellbeing. This project is still in an exploratory stage and discussions are taking place with indigenous stakeholders about their interest in this project.(Contact Program Leader Richard Eckersley)

An overview of completed projects

Australia 21 devotes itself to the future – future generations, the environment of the future and the future of the planet. So it is appropriate that the first Australian 21 program to get under way four years ago concerned young Australians.

The overall?purpose of the projects within this program is to identify ways to help young people to optimise their wellbeing and to realise their full potential against a background of often adverse trends in their physical and mental health and wellbeing and a rapidly changing?social environment.

It is recognized that the social context of young people today is not that of earlier generations. It extends further than the family, the neighbourhood, and the school. The wider world beyond is no longer remote, nor its influences merely incidental.

The report of the project 1.1, 'Flashpoints & signposts: Pathways to ?success and wellbeing for Australia's young people', can be downloaded here.

In project 1.2, Australia 21 sought to further understand young people's views of the future and how these views are woven into the stories they create to make sense and meaning of their lives. This ‘storying’ matters not only to young people’s own wellbeing, but also to Australian society.

Futures research has revealed the human susceptibility to apocalyptic fears about the future, especially in times of rapid change. Today, global warming, peak oil and other threats have the potential to intensify this 'irrational' reaction to threat and uncertainty, overwhelming more rational, constructive responses.

The issue has special importance for young people given their stage of psychological and social development and their high stake in the longer-term future.

Australia 21 focused on future expectations and preferences in its second project on young people’s potential and wellbeing. The project report, Generations in dialogue about the future: the hopes and fears of young Australians, was published in April 2007, and is available on the Australia 21 website.

The report was co-authored by Richard Eckersley, a founding director of Australia 21, and Ms Helen Cahill, Dr Ani Wierenga and Professor Johanna Wyn, all of the Australian Youth Research Centre at the University of Melbourne. Members of a research panel and participating students also contributed. Melbourne University funded the project.

The project aimed to improve the understanding of young people’s sense of what the future held for them. An innovative approach based on drama techniques was designed (by Ms Cahill) to open dialogue across traditional disciplinary and age boundaries and to bridge the gap between the agendas and preoccupations of academics and policy-makers and those of young people.

The results suggest that: young people value the opportunity to discuss the future with each other and with adults; they need to be given more of these opportunities, including in schools, families and communities, as part of making sense and meaning of the world and their lives; and they deserve a greater voice on matters of most concern to them. Creating more spaces for dialogue would increase their engagement and capacity to act in the face of daunting challenges.

The project’s focus on young people's future visions was also a vehicle for exploring broader questions of identity, belonging, meaning and values. Their stories about the future allowed the exploration of qualities that research has traditionally examined through objective parameters such as education and labour-force participation, marriage and parenthood.

The core element of the project was a workshop using ‘role-based enquiry’ to allow students from a Melbourne high school to create, show, narrate and interpret their views of the future. Other elements were: a research panel (from futures studies, youth studies, education, psychology, history and drama) who also participated in the workshop; literature reviews; and surveys of young people’s attitudes to trends in quality of life, the future of Australia and the world, and the impacts of science and technology.

Thus the project marries the sciences with the humanities and the arts, and quantitative with qualitative approaches. Rather than wash out the different points of view through the production of a synthesis, the report presents these different perspectives in the words of the different authors. There are many points of agreement woven through these narratives, and there are differences of interpretation by participants on key issues.

The surveys, carried out pro bono by Ipsos Mackay Research, provide a broader context to the qualitative research, a less rich but more representative picture of young people’s views. Most young Australians are personally optimistic about their own lives, but a growing proportion appears to believe quality of life is declining, despite a long economic boom that has seen sustained, strong economic growth, declining unemployment and rising incomes. The gap between their expected and preferred futures for Australia has widened over the past decade, and concerns about the future of the world have increased.

The responses of the students who participated in the workshop were consistent with other research that suggests that young people are growing up in a context that individualises responsibility, but offers few clear answers to the ‘big picture’ challenges. Most found it very difficult to name ways in which they could personally contribute to a wider agenda of constructing preferred futures and actively link the personal to the local to the global.

The workshop highlighted the importance of developing processes that enabled cross-disciplinary and inter-generational dialogue in a structured way to promote active listening, the recognition of shared concerns and collective responsibility for developing solutions. It demonstrated that these structured processes could lead to hope, a sense of possibility, and an interest in taking action.