Community Fellowships support research for social impact

Community organisations do some of society’s most important work. They tackle urgent issues like homelessness, family violence and social exclusion, and provide critical support for newly arrived migrants and refugees.

But they face significant challenges, including securing funding, policy hurdles, staffing difficulties and reliance on volunteers. This combination can leave community workers with limited mental bandwidth to see the bigger picture or deeply explore their practice.

To address this complex situation our Melbourne Social Equity Institute established its signature Community Fellows Program. This transformative program enables practitioners and thought leaders in small to medium-sized community organisations to investigate an issue of importance to their organisation, mentored by a University of Melbourne researcher.

With their mentors, the Community Fellows are supported to co-produce insights to benefit their organisation and the communities they serve.

Unique among Australian universities, the award-winning Community Fellows Program is a way for the University of Melbourne to provide access to its knowledge base for genuine and enduring public benefit, breaking down barriers between academic, practitioner and lived experience.

The program is based on the understanding that community organisations are often best placed to undertake the research most relevant to their institution and the communities they serve, using local knowledge to solve grassroots problems.

It enables knowledge exchange without community workers needing to engage in years-long formal research qualifications when their expertise is needed in the field.

Fellows can step outside the daily demands of their work for a year, and receive expert guidance on how they might document, evaluate, share and scale their work for greater positive impact. In addition to academic mentoring, Fellows receive research training, funding for their organisations to compensate for time away from work, a small research budget, and opportunities to build their professional network across the community sector.

The range of organisations involved with the program so far is diverse, and includes: the Women’s Circus, exploring and evaluating circus performance as a tool for social change and inclusion; advocacy organisation WestJustice, making consumer law clearer and fairer for new migrants living in Australia; the Human Rights Law Centre, investigating ways to prevent modern slavery in particular among refugees and asylum seekers; and Whittlesea Community Connections, learning how people with refugee and migrant backgrounds perceive volunteering.