The Future of Our Regions 2035 Youth Design Challenge is a free online design thinking challenge that empowers youth to consider how they can reimagine the future of their regions and make it more sustainable and prosperous. It empowers youth to identify problems, reframe them as opportunities, develop solutions, and create prototypes. Young people aged 10-21 will also be able to enter the challenge and be in the draw to win prizes to help them develop their ideas further.

Regional youth face challenges that differ from those in metropolitan areas. Access to educational resources, career opportunities, healthcare, and recreational activities can sometimes be limited by geography. 

It's now more important than ever to encourage youth to create solutions that work for their communities and empower them to build strong foundations in their regions.

Through this challenge, young people will have the opportunity to ideate sustainable and practical solutions for how they can approach the future of their regions for 2035 and beyond. 

There are two entry categories:

• Junior Category: 10-13-year-olds (2 winners will be chosen)
• Senior Category: 14-21-year-olds (2 winners will be chosen)

The top 20 ideas will be shortlisted and taken to our judging panel. Winning ideas will be selected from the pool of the top 20 finalist ideas.

Two winners from each category will be chosen by our judging panel.

Entries close October 17th, 2025. 

Finalists will be announced October 22nd, 2025. 

Winners will be announced November 11th, 2025 at our virtual showcase event, 5pm-6:30pm. Get your free ticket here! 

All finalists will receive a Future of Our Regions Design Challenge Finalist certificate. 

Winners from the Junior and Senior Category will also receive: 

• A Young Change Agents prize pack.
• 2 x 1-hour virtual mentoring sessions to help take their idea to the next stage 

Youth: You can do this challenge independently, with a friend, in a team, or with your siblings! Just download the resources, do the challenge, and submit a project page! 

Educators & Parents: If you'd like your students or children to participate in this challenge, please download the resources via the signup form. You will receive access to all of the resources you need to run the challenge with your students or children. You can submit a project page on behalf of your students or children, or they can do it themselves. Instructions for entering the challenge can be found in the resources.

All challenge entries must be submitted by the challenge close date.

All finalists will receive feedback from the judges.

Anyone aged 10-21 years old can enter and participate in this challenge.

Young Change Agents is a not-for-profit social enterprise that empowers young people across Australia to find problems in their community, reframe them as opportunities, and then come up with solutions.

You need to choose one of the following themes to focus on:

1. Connection: How might we improve digital and physical connection in regional Australia to strengthen communities?
2. Resilience: How might we make our regions more resilient to disasters?
3. Career Opportunities: How might we create accessible, future-focused employment opportunities that keep young people in the regions?
4. Health: How might we improve access to quality healthcare in regional Australia?
5. Food Growth and Production: How might we improve the lives of farming families & communities?
6. First Nations: How might we celebrate and preserve First Nations culture in our regions?

Now that you’ve chosen, it’s time to start the design challenge!

You want to start by deep diving into the challenge you’ve chosen. You may want to look at some of the additional resources to get a better understanding of the topic you’ve chosen.

Then, it’s time to find someone you can interview about the challenge. These interviews are known as “empathy interviews” as you start to learn more about the problem by empathising with the person you are interviewing and understanding some of the challenges they face.

So, find a partner and ask them to tell you about this problem and how it affects them. We have sample questions for each of the chosen themes but please feel free to ask your own as well.

For example: If you are the 'Doing Good with Money' theme, you might ask your partner the following questions:

• What causes or problems do you care about in the world?
• How do you or others around you use money to support a cause of problem?
• Have you ever donated to charity?
• Have you been asked to 'round up' at the supermarket or in online shopping, and what did you think of this experience?
• What stops you from donating more?

Make sure to dig deeper as your partner answers by asking “why”!

To create a solution that will have a positive impact you need to think about who is being affected by the problem. Whilst we are all impacted by issues in the long run it’s important to be specific. Is it young people like you? Is it children in primary school? Maybe it's young adults? Try and figure out who you want to help!

Make sure you take plenty of notes as you interview your partner. Keep your notes from these interviews and it will be useful for the customer/user section of your submission!

From your empathy interviews, you will get interesting insights about some problems this person might have in helping to be part of the solution. Take a look through your notes and circle all of the problems or challenges you found in your empathy interviews.

Now pick the most important one. This problem should also feel exciting for you to solve.

For example:

"Jackie wants to give back to a charity, but doesn't know how or which one to choose!"
Cause: Jackie is overwhelmed by the amount of charities she can support.

Now that you have identified the problem you are going to solve, it’s time to reframe that as an opportunity.

We want to reframe this so that we’re not thinking about this as a negative but rather, as an opportunity to be creative and innovative problem solvers! We do this by using a simple tool called a “How Might We” statement.

The trick with How Might We statements is to ensure they don’t include the solution in them. This limits our thinking.

For example, if we pick one of the causes of Jackie's problem:
“Jackie wants to give back to a charity, but doesn't know how or which one to choose!”

The question might become:
"How might we make it easier for Jackie to find information on charities that align with her values?"

Now you have your opportunity, it is time to be creative and come up with ideas!

• Get a notebook, post-its or some coloured paper and come up with as many ideas as you can.
• Imagine you have one million dollars and you can do anything you want. Imagine you had to use tech to do it. Then imagine you had no access to tech..what would you do?
• Push yourself to come up with at least ten different ideas. Then take a break and try and come up with even more!
• Think about the audience you chose and how you could best help them.

Once you’ve got a lot of ideas, choose the one you think would best solve your opportunity. This is your solution.

Remember there’s no such thing as a bad idea!

Before you share your ideas or spend time building something, it’s a good idea to test and improve your ideas. This process is called validation. This could be done by talking to your parents about what you have created and asking for some feedback. You could even consult the target group you are trying to help (this may not work if you are helping animals), but you can make it even better as you get more feedback on your idea. Don’t forget to try and avoid close contact with people and use the internet and the phone where possible.

Another great way to test is to create a prototype - this is a draft version of your idea. You can do this by drawing what your idea would look like, creating a mini-version, building something out of recycled materials, or creating a plan of what the idea could look like. You can then show your prototype to potential users and ask for their feedback.

Now that you’ve got an idea, we want to hear all about it!

Click ‘Enter your idea’ at the top of this page to submit your idea.

Keep in mind we’ll ask you for a logo and a picture of your solution. This could be of your brainstorming, a picture of what your idea would look like, a poster promoting your idea or something else that is a visual representation of your idea.