Activate: Unleashing Enterprising Doers and Thinkers in Every Classroom

The world of work is changing. Employers are listing more enterprise skills than technical skills (FYA 2016). The demand is increasing for critical thinking (+170%), creativity (+62%), presentation skills (+24%), and teamwork (+20%), and yet 30%+ of young people are not proficient in these areas (FYA 2016). Through Activate, young people across Australia are explicitly building these key skills that employers and universities need. Through this, Future Anything ensures that those young people will lead, and thrive in, the future economy. Our students will shift from being job seekers to job creators, fundamentally shaping Australia's innovation and business ecosystems.

Activate solves these problems by creating enterprising students, enterprising educators, and enterprising schools. Activate empowers educators to build a generation of young people who ‘think’ like entrepreneurs. It uses enterprising thinking as the pedagogical vehicle to build the capacity of young people across six key capabilities: Communication Project Management Critical Thinking Problem-Solving Adaptive Mindset Innovation Activate achieves this through 3 components: 1. Teacher capacity building through specialised professional learning and unlimited coaching and support for educators. 2. Access to a fully-resourced curriculum, and each school's own 'EiR' 3. Access to $20k+ in funding and support through our National Grand Final

Since 2018, c20,000 students have participated in Activate. In 2023, we have 63 schools/209 teachers /5354 students - up from 6 schools/13 teachers/542 students (2018). From a strong but largely QLD-focussed base in 2020, Future Anything has expanded into SA & NSW in 2021, and VIC & WA in 2023. In 2022, 99% of educators would recommend our workshops to others, and of 813 school-age students who completed our 2022 Post-Activate Survey, 70% said they would recommend the program to others. The survey also showed that student confidence increased in all six of our target ‘future capabilities’.

Future Anything plays a critical and unique role in connecting Australia’s education, innovation and business ecosystems to foster our future leaders, movers, shakers, thinkers and doers from all communities, regardless of background or circumstances. We are the only Australian youth entrepreneurship provider that: - is educator-founded, educator-led & educator-delivered - is financially stable and scaling without annual grants or government funding - is Australian-curriculum aligned as an assessable unit of work for schools - is educator-focused, with embedded, integrated teacher professional development - provides post-program pathways, culminating in a national competition with students pitching live for the support to launch their businesses into the real world - is focussed not only on building student-led startups, but also on explicitly building teachers’ capacity to deliver a future-focussed & innovative curriculum that improves the employability of young people Future Anything is recognised as an industry leader in entrepreneurship education, not just in Australia but globally. This is demonstrated by FA being featured as one of only ten global initiatives in the Prince's Trust’s ‘2021 Report on The Future of Work’, and being the only non-EU organisation invited to participate in ‘Impact-Driven Entrepreneurship Education for Children’ (IDEEC), an EU-funded project led by Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS).