Where it all began.
In 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, three young women founded FFT with a simple conviction: the long-term future of young Australians was being ignored, and someone needed to do something about it.
That first year, FFT ran the largest consultation of young people in Australian history. More than 10,000 young Australians shared their priorities, concerns and hopes in the Awareness to Action consultation. What emerged surprised us. The conversation started with climate change, but it quickly revealed something deeper. Young people didn't just feel anxious about the future. They felt locked out of shaping it. Short-term political thinking wasn't just a policy problem. It was a lived experience.
Awareness to Action wasn’t just another report. It has guided everything FFT has done since.
What we built.
Over five years, FFT has grown from a pandemic-era idea into Australia's leading organisation advancing long-term, intergenerational governance. We established the Australian Parliamentary Group for Future Generations, uniting almost 30 parliamentarians from across the political spectrum around a shared agenda for ambitious, long-term policymaking. We built the Intergenerational Fairness Coalition, now comprising nearly 40 civil society organisations. We developed the research, the relationships and the political groundwork that led, in February 2025, to the introduction of the Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill into the Australian Federal Parliament, the first bill of its kind in Australia's history.
It was a landmark moment. And it raised an immediate question: what comes next?
The next step.
The Bill was the culmination of years of work. Without a public mandate to pass it into law, without shared national direction and without the civic infrastructure to hold leaders accountable over time to its ask, even robust reform like this remains fragile.
We immediately began looking for the step to drive impact. Something structural. Something that could shift the conditions for long-term decision-making in Australia and make future legislation like this possible; not just for a term, but for generations to come.
The answer to these questions was a National Conversation. A large-scale, structured process that would bring everyday Australians into a shared process to shape the future direction of their country and its decision-making, together. But to do it well and ensure its outcomes would last, we first needed to design it properly.
That is what the Lab is for.
Why are we the right organisation to lead this.
We are not starting from scratch. We are bringing five years of relationships, credibility and coalition-building to bear on the most ambitious project we have undertaken since our establishment.
We are leveraging the last three decades of work in this area, and have invested years in building a network of community leaders, political champions, public servants and policy leaders who have been part of this journey and are ready to act. We have the civil society coalition, over 50 individuals and organisations already aligned around a shared agenda. We have the research foundations, from the Awareness to Action consultation to the Fair Go for All survey, the For Our Future Policy Brief, and the Portraits Of Our Future collection.
FFT doesn't just convene. We drive. We strategise. We build the conditions for change, and then we push until change happens.
Inspired by the lived experience of real Australians.
The Lab didn't begin with frameworks and governance structures. It began with people.
Portraits of Our Future grew from a simple question: what does long-term decision-making actually mean for the lives of everyday Australians? Housing security. Job stability. Whether the place they grew up in will still be there for their children. Whether the decisions being made today are setting the next generation up or holding them back.
What emerged were portraits of Australians from across the country. Different regions, different generations, different circumstances, each one making visible what is at stake in the decisions we keep deferring.
These stories do something that policy documents rarely manage. They show that intergenerational thinking isn't an academic concept; it is the difference between a future that works for everyone and one that leaves people behind.
They are the reason we believe this work cannot wait. And they are the human foundation on which the Lab is built.
Explore Portraits Of Our Future.
What We’re Asking of Australia
Not blind faith. Not optimism about politics. Just a willingness to believe that the country should think further ahead, and that the way we build the foundations for that thinking matters.
That belief is what brought us to this work. We hope it brings you to it too.