The Community Fellows Program: enabling community organisations to set and lead their own research agendas

Welcome back to the Networking Sessions for the Community of Practice for the Carnegie Community Engagement Network. In the first session of 2023, you will listen from Charlene Edwards about The Community Fellows Program at Melbourne Social Equity institute.

Melbourne Social Equity Institute’s Community Fellows Program recognises that community organisations are often best placed to undertake the research most relevant to their organisation and the communities they serve. Piloted in 2016 and consolidated following evaluation in 2017, the program was developed in recognition that community organisations possess deep and extensive practice knowledge, but often lack the capacity, time and resources to test, codify and share this knowledge. The program also grows solutions-focused social equity research beyond the life of each fellowship by fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange between Community Fellows, the organisations they represent, and University of Melbourne researchers. To date, Melbourne Social Equity Institute has supported more than 50 fellows from a diverse range of organisations including community legal centres, service providers and advocacy organisations.

Session agenda

Charlene Edwards will present on her learnings to date in creating and implementing the Community Fellows Program at the University of Melbourne. She will explain the rationale for the engagement model, and how she navigated existing University of Melbourne systems to enable the establishment of the program. She will also speak to the mutual benefits accrued to the participating Academic Mentors and Community Fellows. Her presentation will be followed by a discussion on the potential transferability of the model to other settings.

Speaker Bio

Charlene Edwards is the Executive Officer of the Melbourne Social Equity Institute, where her role is to facilitate and support interdisciplinary and community-engaged research across a broad range of social equity issues. She is the co-creator of the Institute’s highly successful Community Fellows Program and has a broader interest in creating programmatic and systematic pathways to support people with lived experiences of marginalisation to meaningfully participate in research.

*The registration is online and free of charge. No limit on the number of registrations.

Do not hesitate to forward this invitation to your network of higher education colleagues and community partners.

We are looking forward to connecting again soon!