Digital Futures

The STORY

Most resources about young people and technology start with an adult question: is social media good or bad? Dear Digital Future started with a young person's idea.

More than a year before there was any funding, a member of our National Youth Collective put their hand up and said they wanted to make something about technology, in their own voice and on their own terms. It sat there as a good idea we couldn't yet pay for. Then the Telstra Foundation's Digital Futures partnership came through, and we got to say yes.

The challenge: where we started

The Telstra Foundation's Australian Youth Digital Index had put numbers on young people's digital lives. Almost half of young people (45%) said they worry about being cyberbullied, and 85% feel they are learning digital skills on their own.

The numbers were strong. What they needed was voices. The challenge was to turn a research report into something young people would choose to listen to, without squashing a complicated picture into good versus bad.

The solution: our approach

We handed young people the production desk and stayed out of their way.

1. Start with their idea. The Collective first proposed a podcast about technology in a Blue Sky session. We kept the idea alive until the Digital Futures funding arrived.
2. Ground it in the evidence. Collective members worked through the Index in creative workshops, then built the series around what they found.
3. Give them the production desk. Around twenty young people aged 12 to 20 ran it. Hansika took on Executive Producer, and others owned their own episodes, from planning and scripting to hosting and recording. We trained them, bought them gear to record at home, and put professional producers alongside them for sound and visuals. The creative calls were theirs.
4. Make every episode a tension, not a verdict. The young producers refused the adult question and framed each of the eight episodes as something they already live inside: Likes and Dislikes, Efficiency and Procrastination, Public and Private, Complex and Simple, Kindness and Hate, Social and Isolated, Control and Agency, Fake and Real.
5. Release it where they listen. The series went out across Spotify and YouTube from late 2025, with reels to point people towards it, and moves into PR PLUS so teachers can use it in class.

The difference it made: our impact

The series found an audience, and the people who made it came out with skills they did not have before.

• Reach. Across paid and organic channels, the series and its reels reached 100K+ people, including 60,000+ on TikTok and 1,000+ podcast listens.
• Voices that sound like them. Because the producers set the framing, the episodes explore a real tension, such as "Is anything real anymore?" or "Are we in control of our feed, or does it control us?", rather than lecturing.
• New skills. Around twenty young people finished knowing how to script, host, record and produce, and knowing they can make something real and put it into the world.
• A bigger stage. Our CEO, Lucy Thomas, built a national conference keynote in Queensland around the project.
• Part of something larger. Dear Digital Future is one strand of Digital Futures, which also took PROJECT ROCKIT workshops into 22 schools across 18 Telstra communities in 2025-26, from Darwin to Port Lincoln to Shepparton.
• Classroom-ready. The series is available to schools through PR PLUS as a resource for building digital literacy.

Key numbers and voices