The Lab’s Themes: What Shapes What We Want to Do?
The way the Lab works with young people and other stakeholders is shaped by a set of interconnected themes that guide our thinking, our partnerships and our practice.
These themes link the local with the global, and the global with the local. They are made concrete through the projects we undertake and propose, the research and evaluation we conduct, the books, articles and reports we publish, and the ideas we share through blogs and other public commentary.
These are not abstract concerns. They are the conditions young people are actually navigating, and the questions that drive everything the Lab designs, researches and proposes.
Across all of them, we hold a consistent commitment: that young people’s lives and futures are shaped by social class, gender, sexuality, First Nations and ethnic backgrounds, abilities and geography. Any serious response to the challenges they face has to begin from that reality.
Young People and Intergenerational Justice: What are our Obligations to Future Generations?
The decisions being made now — about climate, about economies, about technology, about education — will shape the lives of young people who are already here, and of generations not yet born. That is not an abstract ethical proposition. It is a practical challenge that shows up in every project the Lab designs.
Intergenerational justice asks us to think beyond the next funding cycle or the next election. It asks: what are our obligations to people who will inherit the consequences of what we do and fail to do today? Working with young people to hold these longer horizons — 2030, 2050, seven generations — is not idealism. It is, we would argue, the only realistic response to the scale and nature of the challenges we face.
Young People, the Pandemic and its Aftermaths
The COVID-19 pandemic did not affect all young people equally. It disrupted education and employment pathways, deepened mental health pressures, widened existing inequalities and left many young people more uncertain about their futures than any generation in recent memory.
Several of the Lab’s projects were initiated during the pandemic. In its aftermath, our work remains focused on the social, economic and cultural dimensions of young people’s wellbeing, their pathways through education and into work, and their sense of belonging in communities that were, for a time, asked to stop. We are concerned not only with recovery, but with understanding what the pandemic revealed about the conditions that made young people vulnerable in the first place — and with not simply restoring those conditions.
Young People, the Climate Crisis and Regenerative Futures
The climate crisis is the defining challenge of this century. Young people know this — they are already living with its consequences, from bushfires and floods to ecological anxiety and the sense that the futures they were promised may not materialise in the forms they were promised.
The Lab’s approach to this challenge is not primarily about harm reduction, though harm reduction matters. It is oriented toward what comes next: the active, ongoing work of renewal and transformation that regeneration requires. Regeneration means going beyond sustainability — beyond doing less damage — toward building social and ecological systems that are genuinely capable of renewal and flourishing. That is a larger task than any single project or programme can accomplish. But it is the horizon against which the Lab’s work is oriented.
We partner with young people, communities and organisations that are already doing this work, and we support them to do it more effectively, more equitably and with stronger evidence behind them.
Young People and the Age of Machine Intelligences
The rapid development of machine intelligences is transforming every institution young people move through: schools, universities, workplaces, communities and democratic life. The questions this raises — about creativity, work, learning, power, privacy and what it means to be human in a world of increasingly capable machines — are not questions that can wait for consensus to emerge among technologists and policymakers.
Young people are already living inside these transformations. The Lab works with them and with partner organisations to design responses that are ethically serious, democratically grounded and attentive to the specific ways these changes are shaping young people’s lives — especially those whose lives are already shaped by disadvantage and exclusion. The Age of Machine Intelligences is not just a technical challenge. It is a question about what kind of society we want to build, and who gets to be part of building it.
