Empowering young people to create the change they wish to see.

Country: Australia

Organization: Vibewire Youth Media and Arts Inc.

Year the initative began (yyyy) - 2002

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Positioning in the Mosaic of solutions

Main barrier addressed: Young men’s missing voices and input leads to disconnection and failed policies
Main insight addressed: Unleash creativity that channels experiences of risk and vulnerability toward leadership

Describe your program or new idea in one sentence. - Vibewire is rebuilding Australia's democratic culture by creating platforms for young people to express themselves and supporting them to gain the skills to do so.

What makes your initiative uniquely positioned to create change in your community? - Vibewire is a unique and vital resource for young people in this country. It is one of the few services of any type that addresses one of the key causes of inequality and disempowerment amongst our young people – their lack of a place to tell their own story and share their own experiences.

The aging demographics and high level of media concentration of Australia mean that young people very often have little control over the way they are represented in the mainstream media, both to their peers and to the broader community at large.

Vibewire addresses the crucial issue of access to media by creating forums for young people to express their views through a variety of cultural forms, and network with their friends, families and peers. It creates crucial opportunities for “shared infrastructure” that assist young people in the community to tell their own stories, share skills and knowledge, and create a vital new perspective in the Australian community.

Describe how you organize and carry out your work? - Vibewire approaches creating social change on a number of levels:
-We create platforms for young people to express themselves
-We assist young people to gain the skills and confidence to use these platforms; and
-We promote the voices of young people more broadly.

Vibewire has five core projects: Vibewire.net, the Reelife Short Film Festival, the annual e-Festival of Ideas, Interface Anthology and the sQuareOne media and arts space, along with major one-off or less frequent projects such as electionTracker and the NewConnections Conference (held in December).

What is your plan to scale and expand your innovation into your community and beyond? - We are currently in the beta stage of relaunching our flagship Vibewire.net youth expression portal. The new site allows young people to express themselves in a variety of forms beyond text, including film, audio and photography. Promotion will commence in March and we expect to see rapid growth in the traffic, membership and volume of content submitted.

The sQuareOne community and creative project incubator has been successfully established in Sydney over the past year and we hope to roll out the model nationally over the next five years, especially focusing on outer-suburban and regional areas where the need is greatest.

Reelife Short Film Festival is expanding nationally this year, screening in Perth, Darwin and regional areas for the first time. We are also adding an international program, Hot Spots: youth made films from conflict zones around the world, in partnership with UNICEF.

We are increasingly working with Government and larger NGO's to assist them to better involve, engage and inspire young people.

What other resources, institutional, or policy needs would be necessary to help sustain and scale up your idea? - After over five years of producing leading projects to empower younger Australians we are now seeking ways to make our organisation more sustainable. This will require increased funding from more diverse sources and the further development of some key partnerships including, for the first time, with international organisations.

We are currently working with other community media organisations to change government policy around the funding of community media, promoting the broadening of support beyond simply broadcast media. With a recent change in government and a well-developed proposal we hope to see expanded support for all forms of community media involvement including New Media.

To scale up and further professionalise our projects in order to provide expression opportunities and training to more young people and to continue to innovate in the form of these opportunities we require more predictability around funding, something we are working on currently, as well as increased funding overall.

Describe your impact in one sentence, commenting on both the individual and community levels. - Thousands of young Australians have had the opportunity to share their stories, participate in public policy debates and gain new skills, enriching Australia's democracy.

What impact has your work achieved to date? - Vibewire has had a profound impact on the lives of thousands of young Australias who have been provided with a unique set of opportunities to communicate their stories, perspectives and ideas. Vibewire.net has published over 4,000 articles since its launch in 2002. Reelife Short Film Festival has been a platform for exploring youth issues has provided a boost to numerous film careers. ElectionTracker and Interface Anthology have identified a new generation of public thinker emerging in Australia and taken their voices and ideas to a wide and intergennerational audience. Several of our writers are now professional journalists and two have had books published. ElectionTracker raised youth issues during the Federal election and demonstrated youth leadership.

We believe we have improved the understanding of the Australian public and policy-makers of the leadership capacity of young people. Our work for other organisations including the City of Brisbane, UN Youth Association, TAFE NSW and Twenty10 gay youth service has expanded access to opportunities.

Number of individuals served: Many tens of thousands of people (most young, but almost many adults interested in youth perspectives) have visited Vibewire.net. Almost 1,000 individual young people 15-30 have been published on Vibewire.net since 2002 (publishing over 4,000 articles). 75 filmmakers have been screened over five years of Reelife, selected from almost 500 entries. Almost 100 young people have gone through workshop programs. 30 writers have been published in two issues of Interface, and five have had the opportunity to speak at Writers Festivals. 14 projects have been or are being developed by young people in the sQuareOne space since it opened in April. 8 'Trackers' have had the experience of their lives as youth reporters on the campaign trail of the past two Federal elections.

Several hunded volunteers have also been actively involved in organising Vibewire projects, gaining great skills and new confidence along the way. Over twenty young people have served on our Board.
Community impact: Young people often feel marginalised and ignored, that noone is listening to them or interested in what they have to say. They often struggle to form a positive sense of themselves and their capability to create change.
Vibewire projects create new community connections and opportunities for young people, building their skills, confidence and resilience and helping put their voices 'on the table'.

"An enormous thankyou from the bottom of my heart for the magnificent opportunities and exposure that you’ve given me over the years. Vibewire.net is a unique space for ideas and creative expression."
-Young writer

I started volunteering for Vibewire at a time when I knew I wanted to work in online content production, but lacked the necessary skills and experience to be able to gain employment in the industry. My success in being employed as a Website Manager is due in large part to what I was able to achieve, learn and experience at Vibewire."
-Former volunteer.
Society at large: Australian democracy has become increasingly technocratic, divorsed from the day-to-day engagement and culture of participation that must underpin it. Cynicism and apathy are rife, especially about young people, but there is little leadership by government in addressing this issue. Furthermore our media regularly stereotypes and demonizes young people. Our projects challenges these assumptions and builds participation by allowing young people to tell their stories, convincing them of the value of their voices and the importance of getting involved in creating the future.

What measure do you use to gauge your impact and why? - We judge our impact by:
-the number of participants
-the feedback from participants (evaluation survey's are used at the end of every project or workshop)
-the wider recognition of young people's voices (media coverage, political recognition, etc).

We also use external evaluators for particular projects. Evaluation tools often include personal interviews, survey's, observation and demographic data collection.

How is your initiative currently being financed and how would you finance further expansion and/or replication? - We currently rely on grants for the majority of our income, with fee-for-service work (creative project development and implementation work we do for other NGOs and Government to assist them to communicate with and involve young people more effectively), sponsorship and earned-revenue making up the rest.

We hope to finance our expansion through the futher development and growth of these non-grant revneue streams and have begun to develop private donors for the first-time, with donations comprisiing almost 10% of revenue so far this financial year, from 0% last financial year. Within the next couple of years we would also like to develop a paid membership scheme.

Provide information on your current finances and organization: - a. annual budget
b. annual revenue
c. sources of revenue (please provide percentages if known)
d. number of staff (full-time, part-time, and volunteers) a. Our 2007/8 budget is $270,000

b. We turned over just under $A250,000 last financial year and expect that to increase this financial year.

c. Grants (60%), Sponsorship (20%), fee-for-service work [contracts carried out for other NGOs and Government - we only accept work which is mission-relevant] (12%), earned-revenue [ticket sales, anthology sales, sQuareOne residency fees etc] (8%)

d. Full-time: 2. Part-time: 4 (increasing during peak project periods). Volunteers: 40 (fluctuates depending on which projects are running and does not include contributors such as writers and filmmakers which, if included, would take the number well over 100).

Who are your potential partners and allies? - Our potential partners and allies are anyone who cares about young people's participation in our society. This includes the government, non-government, educational and corporate sector. Our current partners and allies include childrens NGOs, local governments in three states, private donors, media organisations, academics, representative bodies, foundations and UN agencies (UNICEF, UNESCO).

Over the next couple of years we would like to further develop our international relationships.

Who are your potential investors? - There are numerous foundations and individuals with an interest in youth empowerment and participation and as our model becomes more accepted and understood (media and arts-based expression), something we see happening currently, we are confident that many of these potential investors will become active investors. There are opportunities for further government funding and we are successfully pursuing greater investment by private donors, as well as building on our relationships with foundations.

What is the origin of this innovation? Tell us your story. - When I was 16 I went to the United States for a year on a student exchange. While there I was selected to attend the State of the World Forum (www.worldforum.org) in San Francisco. The experience of attending completely changed my life. 32 young people from 28 countries were invited to participate in profound discussions with adult leaders (including Presidents, Prime Ministers, Nobel Laureates, scientists, spiritalists, business people) about the future of our planet. My attendance was a coincidence, a product of the partnership between the Forum and my exchange organisation, AFS. Had they looked for a worthy representative of young Australians I would not have heard about the opportunity, as I was not connected to relevant networks. Had I heard of it I would not have applied. Had I applied I would not have been selected. But there I was, being included, listened to, respected. It was an incredible experience but I knew even then then it was an incredibly rare experience, unavailable to the vast majority of young people.

Since then I have been looking for ways to include young people in these conversations that goes beyond a selected group of "youth representative" in a room. Media and arts provide the tools to build more truly democratic conversations and allow young people to express themselves in ways that are meaninful to them. Vibewire is dedicated to both creating innovative platforms and to providing training, mentoring and support to young people to participate in these platforms.

Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers marketing material. - Tom is the founder and CEO of Vibewire, established while he was at university. From a team of student volunteers Vibewire has grown into a dynamic multi-platform organisation. In 2005 Vibewire received the UN’s World Summit Youth Award for the Community Engagement category. Tom is a board member of the International Institute for Communications Australia and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. In 2007 he was awarded a Future Summit Leadership Award and a YouthActionNet Fellowship by the International Youth Foundation.

Contact Information:

Tom Dawkins
CEO
Vibewire Youth Media and Arts Inc.
(NGO)

Submitted by: tomdawkins