Readings
NEWS The Future By Us- The Vine
27/03/2009
When Melbourne-born Hugh Evans was fourteen years old, he tagged along with World Vision in the Philippines and spent a night with a Filipino family in a Manila slum called Smokey Mountain. At the time, Smokey Mountain was a rubbish dump the size of a ski-slope - it was home to an entire community who were forced to scavenge and chase garbage trucks for food scraps. "When it came time for bed, we simply cleared the pots and pans away and lay down on a concrete slab about the size of half of my bedroom with seven of us in a line," says Evans. "I didn't sleep a wink that night."
Rolling Stone’s roving political satirist P.J. O’Rourke visited Smokey Mountain too, and wrote that "There are some kinds of desolation that leave you impotent." Hugh Evans, now 26, clearly never subscribed to that view. Evans became World Vision’s first Youth Ambassador and the founder and leader of youth aid organisation the Oaktree Foundation. He was at the front lines of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami relief efforts and the Australian leg of the Make Poverty History campaign, and was named the Young Australian of the Year for his advocacy work in 2004.
While co-chairing the 2020 Youth Summit in 2008, Evans had the opportunity to meet a diverse and impassioned bunch of young movers and shakers from across Australia - which led to his latest project.
"We invited a diverse group of young Australians to come together in a small house in Inverloch, Victoria," Evans says. "Together we spoke about the kind of world we wanted to live in, and the ideas that could create this world."
A new book was the result of their discussions: The Future By Us - Australia Beyond 2020. Edited by Evans and fellow Oaktree leader Tom O'Connor, it’s a collection of essays that crash-tackle the issues affecting Australia in the 21st century, including climate change, multiculturalism, the economic crisis and Australia’s part in the global community.
"We are at a point in history that confronts us with both endless possibility and endless uncertainty," says Evans. "Endless possibility, because never before have we been able to communicate with every corner of the globe and develop ideas that have universal reach. Endless uncertainty, because we see the collapse of global markets and its effect on everyone, on every side of the globe."
Even while it seems the world is hurtling down the path to oblivion, Evans and his Future By Us co-writers are inherently optimistic about change, and that the next generation of Australians will be up to the task. "We need only look at how effectively Barack Obama mobilised youth support from around the world to see that young people are excited about a strong vision for the future," he says. "We realise that there are enormous challenges facing Australia, and the times demand profound change. This book is a call to arms to our generation to step up with the vision and the guts to make the hard decisions."
The Future By Us edited by Hugh Evans and Tom O'Connor is published by Hardie Grant Books
-Story by Darryn King
