We started in schools. We have stayed in schools.

Our story

From 38 students in Launceston to national programs – fifteen years of the same passion.

illuminate was founded in 2010 by Adam Mostogl in Launceston, Tasmania. The original problem was specific: young people in Tasmania were being taught about business from a board-level perspective that bore no resemblance to the economy they were actually entering. In a state where 95% of businesses employ fewer than five people, students were walking out of school with a map that did not match the territory.

In November 2011, the first illuminate:nextgen Challenge was hosted at the Australian Maritime College and the University of Tasmania in Launceston. Thirty-eight students from four schools. The Mayor of Launceston opened the program. Representatives from Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand, the University of Tasmania and the Australian Maritime College sat on the panel. Every venue was offered free of charge. Something real happened in that room – and it was clear immediately that it needed to happen in more of them.

What followed was fifteen years of deliberate growth – into regional Tasmania, then Hobart and the North West Coast, then nationally. Programs were delivered on King & Flinders Islands in Bass Strait, in Alice Springs, Darwin, Townsville, Wollongong, the Gold Coast, suburban Perth and inner-city Melbourne. In 2017, student numbers grew by more than 300% in a single year.

In 2019, illuminate made a deliberate shift – stepping away from a specifically entrepreneurship and business focus toward its current approach: building confident, creative and capable young people. That shift came directly from feedback from schools, who said the reason they kept coming back was the capabilities students developed, not the business content specifically. The work became clearer. The impact became more measurable.

Just like for everyone else, 2020 saw everything stop as travelling was limited, schools closed and other restrictions were put in place during the COVID pandemic. Our team continued to connect with students through digital programs and developed a working from home resource (that became the foundation of our illuminateX program) and once we could travel again, our team were back in schools engaging with students.

The interruptions of 2020 and 2021 sharpened our thinking about the benefit of in-person learning and how it is so hard to replicate, but also the benefit of being in communities, working in place alognside other passiontae people – and we’ve used this to keep reaching more locations across Australia. This deep engagement also shaped the development of adaptions including our Agribusiness program which has been co-designed and is facilitated with agronomists, and our STEAM program to create an authentic experience around these skills.

As AI and automation have reshaped the conversation about what education needs to do, illuminate has found itself at the centre of it – not because the work changed, but because the world caught up with what we were already building. The capabilities that remain distinctly human – critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, student agency, communication, problem solving – are the ones we have been developing since that first program in 2011.