Headspace, the National Youth Mental Health Foundation, was launched in 2006 as part of the Australian Government’s commitment to the Youth Mental Health Initiative (YMHI). It was established to promote and facilitate improvements in the mental health, social wellbeing and economic participation of young people aged 12-25 years-old. headspace aims to achieve this by: Providing...

This report presents the results of the evaluation of the short-run impacts of the Communities for Children (CfC) initiative on child, family and community outcomes. The study was based on a three-wave longitudinal study of 2,202 families living in 10 sites that had a CfC program and five sites comparable to the CfC sites (contrast...

Sustainability is becoming more important to the general policy discourse on protecting the environment. But despite government adopting a National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development some twelve years ago, Australia's performance on crucial items such as emissions of carbon dioxide equivalents remains poor. Arguably, say Kate Norris and Roger Patulny, not only must people's attitudes...

Social capital is a contentious and multifaceted topic. A broad consensus has been reached, however, that norms such as trust, networks of association membership, and practices of volunteering and socialising are essential to its makeup. It is also increasingly recognised that such elements fall into two distinct types of social capital - bonding and bridging...

Prepared for the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia, this report provides new estimates of the income older Australians need for a comfortable, sustainable standard of living. For a 70 year old woman in September 2003 the standard was $611.50; for a man, $597.50; and for a couple, $795.20.