The first-ever Blackbird Foundation Impact Report. But make it a zine.

Most impact reports are full of charts and metrics. We went a different route: we asked our community of young creators to submit their work - poems, photographs, essays, artworks, stories from the trenches. What you're holding is a snapshot of creativity in Australia and New Zealand in 2025. It's diverse, it's beautiful, it's sometimes weird. Exactly as it should be.

What's inside: This year we received over 350 applications for funding. We gave out 90 Protostars grants, 15 Follow-On Fund grants, and 5 Believers grants. The projects spanned STEM, Arts, and Media - everything from portable dialysis machines to murder mystery events, from algae-based milk to video games about Food Girls fighting Mould People.

Across all those applications, some fascinating patterns emerged. We documented them through three essays:

• 'The Breakdown' explores how young people are pushing back against tech saturation - not by rejecting it, but by creating hybrid forms from within. Think: embroidered climate action messages. Dance pieces about AI. Hardware for remote communities.
• 'Building Cultural Infrastructure' looks at how young people are constructing the scaffolding that allows others to create - zines, community spaces, funding hubs, screening collectives. The institutions aren't building this anymore. So they are.
• 'Wonders Small and Large' celebrates the full spectrum of making - from urgent problem-solving to pure joy, from protest to play. A love letter to creative acts both big and small. Between these essays, you'll find: contributor work that stopped us in our tracks. Project snapshots that show what's actually happening. Images that capture the energy of people mid-make.

Why collect this: Because it's a moment in time. Because the work is beautiful. Because these young people are building from a place of absence - sensing the weight, presence, and friction they've never truly known, and inventing from that absence. They're not trying to return to something lost. They're forging something that hasn't existed yet.

This zine is your front-row seat to that future.