For Youth Empowered Towards Independence (YETI), the Atlas is addressing data needs and supporting local data sovereignty — providing YETI and their partners a robust shared evidence base that can guide strategic planning for children and young people.
One YETI program, Schools Up North (SUN) works alongside school communities across Far North Queensland to respond to the mental health and wellbeing needs of young people through their educational experience. In 2025, SUN began working with the Kowanyama Aboriginal Shire Council on an ambitious project: developing the four-year Kowanyama Youth Strategy in partnership with the Council and local School.
The Kowanyama Youth Strategy will provide the Kowanyama Aboriginal Shire Council the means to ensure that Kowanyama is an enabling environment where all children and young people can realise their potential as young adults, with responsibilities to themselves, their family, their community, their culture and future generations.
In remote communities, the impact of having programs and initiatives that reflect the communities' needs and aspirations is profound — but strategic planning is often constrained by the lack of accessible, reliable, community-relevant data to steer decisions. This makes it harder to see where critical gaps persist, where things are changing, and to advocate effectively for the resources and partnerships the community need.
This is where the Atlas has been especially valuable. Aligning with the Youth Strategy’s conceptual tools and wellbeing framework (ARACY Wellbeing Wheel for Children), the Atlas supports planning by providing child and youth data that is accessible to those who can make a difference in community. The Atlas' broad and reliable database reduces siloing and guess-work, and the ability to compare across regions supports the community to strengthen advocacy with policy-makers.
The Atlas also has the capacity to interact and engage with a unique tool YETI has developed for the Council: the Kowanyama Youth Metric. The Metric brings in nuanced local-level data and community knowledge to help to identify critical gaps that broader datasets can miss and track progress across the strategy’s domains and over time. Together, the Atlas and the Youth Metric strengthen the foundations for locally led planning that is both community-informed and evidence-driven.
For communities like Kowanyama, the Atlas is a key resource enabling local decision makers to easily access and translate data into evidence-based planning, coordinated solutions and stronger advocacy that reflect community priorities and aspirations.
Importantly, the Atlas also supports communities on a national level by advocating for better recognition of local-level data needs — understanding that there needs to be improved systems for better information sharing, enabling local data generation and sharing to improve the circumstances of children and young people across all Australian communities.
