Context
Youth Futures in Grafton was a of strength to be recognised. While there were of youth engagement and wellbeing common to other regions of youth outmigration, limited post-school pathways, and service access, youth inclusion in Grafton was also embedded in community life in ways that surprised us.
The Jacaranda Festival engages young people as ambassadors, developing leadership skills and connecting them across generations. A local hairdresser dedicated an entire floor to apprentices. The Rotary supported young people in international exchanges. When we hired Vines to cater our conference dinner, they brought young trainees and work experience students without being asked because that is what organisations in Grafton do.
The story we heard about why this culture exists was that it had its origins in tragedies in the 1940s and more recent in the 2010s. We were told how these instances informed institutional and cultural changes evident in the community today.
What we did
Our contribution was primarily one of clarity, reflecting Grafton’s youth culture back to the community. The youth integration was a part of culture, or ‘just the way we do things around here’, meaning the strengths were not directly visible and operated as a norm or assumption. This created opportunities to leverage the strength, for example the Jacaranda Festival pursuing funding specifically for its youth leadership programs. Funding from the Seaton Foundation for the Jacaranda Festival youth program was announced at the SIITR25 Local Impact Showcase.
Youth was also integrated into the conference, connecting local young people with a national delegation coordinated by conference partner Futures Isle.
The Youth Futures Impact Lab at the conference, facilitated with Dan Griffin from headspace Grafton, also surfaced challenges and opportunities for improvement around a theme of ‘connection’. Geographic gaps in connection meant that young people in outlying communities without transport had fewer options. There were gaps in connections based on topics of interest, for example If you were interested in sport there might be a vibrant community but options were perceived as thinning considerably for other interests. Connection based on age awas also shared, with young adults sharing that support dropped off sharply at around age 25, leaving a cohort still navigating into adulthood without the structures available to teenagers.
What shifted
- Clarity and understanding was the primary shift and the most instructive. Grafton’s youth inclusion culture was so embedded as a norm that the community did not recognise it as distinctive. The Readiness Index scored vision at 2.2 and feedback loops at 2.1, a potential indication of mechanisms to see and reflect on strengths. The clarity shift was not about surfacing a problem but about making a strength visible and actionable. The culture and history indicator (baseline 2.7) is relevant: the origins of this youth inclusion culture in community tragedies represent institutional memory that had shaped practice without being articulated as a story the community did not reflect externally.
- Connection and connectivity was strengthened in two directions. Internally (baseline 2.7), the Youth Futures Impact Lab connected local youth workers, festival organisers, and headspace practitioners around a shared conversation to surface the geographic, interest-based, and age-based gaps in connection that sat beneath the positive headline. Externally (baseline 3.1), the conference connected local young people with a national delegation coordinated by Futures Isle and brought Dan Griffin from headspace into a facilitated conversation with delegates from across Australia. Representation (baseline 3.9), already a relative strength, was demonstrated on Day 3 when young people from across Australia presented the five readiness conditions through their own lived experience.
- Capability and capacity was strengthened through direct investment. The Seaton Foundation announced $30,000 across three Grafton projects at the Local Impact Showcase: the Jacaranda Festival’s youth leadership program, Pam Hatton’s music mentorship program, and Jayden Sheridan’s Gnarly Neighbours youth engagement initiative. The indicators most directly in play are access to capital – grants and philanthropy (baseline 2.4), where the Festival had never pursued funding specifically for its youth programs and is now doing so, and pipeline (baseline 2.5), where the youth ambassador program, apprenticeship culture, and music mentorship represent a visible and supported pipeline of capability in younger generations that the community was not leveraging for external support.
- Collaboration for purpose was not a primary outcome of this focus area. Youth inclusion in Grafton operates through distributed practice of organisations independently embedding young people rather than through a coordinated collaborative structure. There were youth-focused networks supported by council but not attended by all youth-focused entities. The Impact Lab surfaced the possibility that a more coordinated approach to the identified gaps (geographic, interest-based, age-based) could produce better outcomes or expand on existing social infrastructure.
- Advocacy and promotion shifted as the Jacaranda Festival began telling a different story about its youth programs. The shared narrative indicator (baseline 2.2) is directly relevant in relation to the community telling a story about its youth culture to share with funders, policymakers, and media. This was reflected in the pre-existing condition in the Readiness Index survey statement “advocacy has reduced and has become a little bit stacked with certain services”. The promotion indicator (baseline 2.8) was strengthened through the Local Impact Showcase and conference media coverage, which gave national visibility to local youth initiatives.
What’s forming (impact)
- Economic: The Seaton Foundation investment of $30,000 across three youth-focused projects represents early inward investment in Grafton’s social economy. The music mentorship and Gnarly Neighbours initiatives are emerging micro enterprises. Openness to micro enterprises and entrepreneurialism is the relevant indicator. If the Festival’s youth program attracts sustained philanthropic support, it demonstrates a funding pathway that other community organisations could replicate.
- Social: The relevant indicators related to youth futures include volunteerism and civic engagement through the Festival ambassador program and apprenticeship culture, collective memories through the community’s response to tragedy that shaped current practice, place attachment and sense of community pride through a youth culture that gives young people reason to stay connected to Grafton. The Impact Lab surfaced the equity and diversity dimension – empowerment and engagement of vulnerable groups – by identifying young people without transport access, outside sport, or aged over 25 as cohorts whose experience of inclusion was weaker than the headline suggested.
- Individual: Young people involved in the Festival ambassador program, music mentorship, and conference delegation gained leadership experience, national connections, and public visibility. The individual impact extends to members of the Festival committee who gained recognition that their youth work has external value. Physical and psychological health indicators apply indirectly including the headspace partnership through the Impact Lab maintaining the connection between youth engagement and wellbeing.
- Institutional: There is potential with the Jacaranda Festival reframing itself from an events organisation to a community leadership platform that may have influence on institutional identity and how the Festival is funded, governed, and perceived. This maps to the institutional indicators of strong leadership, shared and integrated planning vision, and multi-stakeholder planning and decision-making.
- Infrastructure: No direct infrastructure impact is expected from this initiative.
- Environmental: No direct environmental impact is expected from this initiative.
