From The Bush Projects
Our Story
From The Bush Projects is a not-for-profit organisation built on more than two decades of ground-level practice with disadvantaged Aboriginal young people.
Our Mission
From the Bush Projects was founded by Milton James, a social work practitioner. For more than two decades, he worked with disadvantaged Aboriginal young people from remote settlements, helping them move to where real jobs exist and supporting them to succeed in the workplace.
What he learned often conflicted with the assumptions of the Aboriginal welfare and employment industries. He had seen the damage caused by generations of welfare dependency — the loss of responsibility, confidence, capability and hope. To knowingly allow generation after generation to remain trapped in these conditions is more than failed social policy; it is a state-sanctioned social tragedy.
From the Bush Projects is about an alternative: real work, self-responsibility, social and economic mobility, life opportunities and the chance for young people to discover what they are capable of doing for themselves.
What We Believe
Real Work
Meaningful employment in the mainstream economy is the most reliable path out of welfare dependency and into a self-determined life.
Self-Responsibility
Young people are capable of far more than the welfare system assumes. Our role is to support that capability, not manage it away.
Worker Mobility
Moving to where jobs exist is not abandonment of culture — it is the exercise of the same freedom every Australian takes for granted.
Evidence Over Ideology
Policy must be judged by outcomes for the people it is meant to serve, not by the comfort it provides to those who design it.
Founder & Author
Milton James
Milton James is a social work practitioner with more than twenty years of direct experience working with disadvantaged Aboriginal young people in remote Australia. His books record what has been tried, what has worked, what has failed, and what has been learned — drawing on real cases, real programs, and real outcomes to inform contemporary Indigenous policy debate.
Get in Touch
For enquiries about our books, our work, or speaking engagements, please reach out by email.
[email protected]