Thirty organisations. Twelve months. One toolkit.
Across Australia, organisations are trying many different ways to engage young people. Those lessons are rarely shared. We brought the sector into one room to change that.
Commissioned by Social Enterprise Australia as part of the Australian Government's Social Enterprise Development Initiative.
The people who made it.
In 2025 and 2026 we launched the Deep Experience Learning Community. It brought more than thirty of Australia's leading youth organisations together to strengthen how young people are engaged as contributors, leaders, and decision-makers.
This national youth engagement toolkit grew out of that shared learning. It brings together their strategies, challenges, and lessons from practice, capturing what is being tried, what is working, and what we are still learning about meaningful youth engagement.
Three kinds of sessions, on repeat for a year.
Learning Sessions
Every month the Community came together for a two-hour session on a single stage of youth engagement. Each began with a guest speaker from a leading social enterprise who shared their models, insights, and hard-won strategies. Participants then moved into breakout rooms of real exchange, comparing approaches and pressure-testing their own against their peers.
Co-design Sessions
Between sessions we synthesised the Community's collective insight into focused five-page strategy booklets. These included the stage's common challenges, guiding insights, strategies, case studies and the assessment checklist.
Application Sessions
Every quarter we released a different section of the toolkit for organisations to use in their day to day work. Organisations could pilot strategies, adapt ideas to fit their context, and test what genuinely worked for young people.
The numbers behind the toolkit.
Across sessions, breakout rooms, and collaboration, our Community of Practice invested close to 1,000 hours together.
Youth and social enterprise organisations from every corner of the country, bringing the realities of city, regional, and remote practice into one shared conversation.
From early 2025 to 2026, more than thirty organisations met month after month to build something none of them could have built alone.
Every strategy in this toolkit was critiqued, refined, and rebuilt by the people who use it. 54 practical approaches across the full lifecycle of youth engagement.
They shared the models, insights, and hard-won strategies behind their own practice, so the Community could learn from experts in youth engagement.
Six organisations opened up their practice in full, showing exactly how strong youth engagement works on the ground.
Every session, in order.
Each Learning Session took one stage of the journey. Co-design sessions rebuilt what we had. Reflection periods consolidated it.
