Building Futures for Young Australians at Risk began in 2012 as a project involving the Youth Research Centre (YRC) and eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) at the University of Melbourne; the Foundation for Young Australians (FYA); Social Ventures Australia (SVA); Dusseldorp Skills Forum (DSF); the Beacon Foundation (Beacon) and Hands On Learning Australia.

The project was funded by the Australian Research Council (LP120100220) and the project research partners, with the stated aim of building a coordinated measurement framework and knowledge archive to link evidence about and from programs that address the needs of young Australians at risk of becoming disconnected from learning and education.

Building Futures for Young Australians at Risk was designed to address the need for systematic and coordinated evidence about interventions designed to improve school participation and employment outcomes for disadvantaged and at-risk young people and the preservation, analysis and dissemination of this evidence. The project's aims were stated as being:

Use available evidence to develop and validate generic, transparent and repeatable measures of outcomes from programs that keep young people connected to education and/or support their pathways into work;

Construct a robust, flexible and responsive generic measurement framework and tools, for ongoing use and refinement by these programs;

Create a national archive for the submission, preservation, dissemination and analysis of data which will enable the sector to build, draw on and test against a large-scale evidence base.

Assessment of the project goals and progress during the second half of 2013 resulted in language around the last of these aims being amended to the creation of a "knowledge archive".