Telstra Foundation are proud to support organisations that have been leading change long before we arrived.
Minus18 has spent over 25 years working alongside LGBTQIA+ young people across Australia, with youth voice and lived experience at the heart of everything they do. Over the past four years in our partnership, our role has been to back that leadership by listening, supporting and helping their work continue to reach more people.
One of the most significant outcomes of this partnership is Queer Youth Now, Minus18’s national survey capturing the experiences of LGBTQIA+ young people. Led and delivered by Minus18, it offers a powerful snapshot of how young people are experiencing school, work and everyday life including:
- 79% of LGBTQIA+ young people aren’t out to everyone at work
- 57% experienced anti-LGBTQIA+ hate in the past year
- Only a third of LGBTQIA+ young people feel safe being fully out at school
With Telstra Foundation’s support, these insights have been turned into practical digital learning experiences and resources, helping schools, workplaces and communities better support the LGBTQIA+ young people in their spaces.
Rebecca Herft (she/her) - Partnerships Team Lead, MINUS18 Foundation
At Minus18, we believe that the best way to create change is by listening to LGBTQIA+ young people themselves. Their experiences, challenges, and hopes guide everything we do from research and surveys to the resources and programs that help workplaces, schools, and communities better support them.
We sat down with members of our education team, Education Team Lead and Facilitator Max and Learning Designer Stephanie, to hear about what it takes to translate youth voice into meaningful action and how the support of the Telstra Foundation has helped bring Queer Youth Now and our eLearning to life.
Q: Why is amplifying LGBTQIA+ youth voice so important?
[Max, Education Team Lead]: It’s about recognising that while LGBTQIA+ young people are the future of our workforces and communities, they aren’t always given a seat at the table where the decisions affecting them are made. By amplifying their voices, we’re helping bring them into the room and ensure that the environments we’re building today are actually fit for the generation that will soon be leading them.
And the impact goes beyond a professional or corporate setting, these insights also help us understand and support the young people in our own personal lives: our kids, relatives, neighbours. When we listen to what these 2,724 young Australians are telling us in Queer Youth Now, we’re better equipped to show up as active allies not just in the boardroom, but at the dinner table too.
[Stephanie, Learning Designer]: While trends cycle, and perhaps we’re seeing things from our own youth resurface (e.g. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and tie dye t-shirts!), it is impossible for us, as adults, to truly understand the experience of young people today without actually hearing from them. Youth voice ensures that what we create is authentic and meets the needs of not only now, but the future. We also know that young people value peer endorsement highly, and when young people make up your current and future clients, customers and coworkers, including youth voices leads to higher and deeper engagement.
Q: How have you included the youth voice in your offering?
[Stephanie, Learning Designer]: It’s embedded in the course in so many ways; not only has youth voice been included in the course, but it has also helped shape the content, the format and the structure. Through Queer Youth Now survey results and in-person youth workshops run by our Education facilitators, we’ve been able to better understand what the current and ongoing needs are. Youth voice also highlighted where and how this content could make the most impact, in spaces that were often missed like retail and hospitality spaces, in youth industries, and for industries with casual and part-time workers. This led us to create a structure of bite-sized modules focusing on empowering allies and arming people with a toolkit of clear actions.
And I’m really excited to say we’ve also created opportunities for young people to include their authentic stories. We’ve commissioned alumni from the Minus18 Young Leaders Program, our leadership program for LGBTQIA+ young people aged 18-24, to write and record stories specifically for the course. These include songs, short stories, interviews and more!
[Max, Education Team Lead]: Throughout the digital courses you will not only see Queer Youth Now statistics shared to provide context around the impact and importance of inclusion and active allyship but also deidentified quotes of impact from the survey participants. The voices of each one of the queer young people who took part in the survey have also shaped the learning outcomes for each one of our courses.
Q: How does your education work translate data and insights into action?
[Max, Education Team Lead]: Data identifies where the gaps are, and our job is to provide the tools to bridge them. For example, the data from Queer Youth Now shows that many young people don’t feel safe being out at work, so we focus our training on the specific, tangible behaviours that change workplace culture. We translate those confronting insights into actionable skills, like using inclusive language or implementing visible allyship, so that teams feel equipped to change those statistics for the better.
Q: What role did the Telstra Foundation play in bringing this project to life?
[Stephanie, Learning Designer]:Well first of all, thanks to the Telstra Foundation, my role was created! Before I came into this role, our team of Education Facilitators continually saw the change of needs when it came to LGBTQIA+ inclusion training. They would gather so much feedback and had so many ideas about how they might be able to better reach these audiences and affect change, but they didn’t have the capacity, frameworks or platforms to implement any of these ideas. This is where I come in! Learning design is really about making the decisions, setting up processes, and harnessing the expertise of our Education Facilitators and youth voice to produce learning experiences that are going to be effective and engaging, and better meet needs. Learning should be fun and dynamic, and the Telstra Foundation has really given us the space and opportunity to bring this to Minus18 Education.
[Bec, Partnerships Team Lead]: The team at the Telstra Foundation have played a critical role in bringing this project to life not just through funding, but through a genuine commitment to backing youth led change. From the beginning, they’ve taken the time to listen and understand what LGBTQIA+ young people are telling us, and trusted Minus18 to lead the response.
Their support has enabled us to turn insights from Queer Youth Now into something tangible from creating dedicated roles like Stephanie’s, to building the infrastructure, tools and platforms needed to deliver impactful eLearning at scale. Importantly, they’ve supported us in a way that strengthens our existing work, rather than reshaping it, allowing youth voice and lived experience to remain at the centre.
It’s a partnership grounded in trust, shared purpose, and a long term vision for change and that’s what has made it possible to not only respond to the needs of LGBTQIA+ young people today, but to continue evolving how we show up for them in the future.
Q: What impact do you hope this work has?
[Max, Education Team Lead]: Definitely the filming day! Seeing all the work of the team and the young voices we captured finally come together was amazing. Also seeing how the behind the scenes of creating a product like this all works from the film crew, to the props and editing!
[Stephanie, Learning Designer]: I really enjoyed having the space to play! And by play I mean, testing and trialing different ideas, no matter how absurd they may have initially seemed. We played with the format, the delivery, the content; we played with different modes of learning and delivery – sound, video, animation, pdfs, stories! We learned so much through this play, too. I also really enjoyed working with the Young Leaders to create their authentic stories. I am always in awe of the talent and passion of young people, especially our Young Leader Alumni!
Q: What impact do you hope this work has?
[Stephanie, Learning Designer]: We want you to understand how much your actions, big or small, can make a difference. We don’t just want you to leave with a terminology checklist -Google can help you with that!- but at the end of the course we want you to feel empowered to choose what actions you might take and to know how you’re making the world safer for LGBTQIA+ youth. And those actions can be as simple as questioning where information you hear might be coming from; trying to include inclusive language into your vocabulary; or even selecting a Queer TV show, musician or book to engage with!
[Max, Education Team Lead]: That creating a safe environment isn’t a daunting, monumental task. It’s a series of small, intentional choices made every day. I’d like people to realise that they have the agency to significantly improve a young person’s experience simply by being informed and showing up as an active ally.
By centering youth voices and partnering with organisations who share that vision, Minus18 is helping to build safer, more inclusive spaces across schools, workplaces, and communities. The launch of our digital learning suite is just the beginning and with partners like the Telstra Foundation, the impact will continue to grow.
