... Section 4 What the Community Says ... In Goodna, the integrated response also needs to be bas... more ... Section 4 What the Community Says ... In Goodna, the integrated response also needs to be based on ensuring that staff understand the needs of children ... range of services involved in the integrated response to know which partnerships and referral pathways they need to develop. ...
The arts remain largely absent from place-based policy, planning and programming in Australia, de... more The arts remain largely absent from place-based policy, planning and programming in Australia, despite a long history of working in place-based ways to create positive social change in communities. This systematic review aimed to address this absence, by providing a synthesis of evidence about the role that place-based arts can play in advancing social equity and addressing social disadvantage. Findings reveal a potential for the arts to create change across individual, community and societal levels, yet empirical evidence to support this potential is weak. Stronger evaluation frameworks that can support capturing the impact of localised place-based arts initiatives for translation into policy and practice are discussed.
Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement, 2008
In Australia, engaged scholarship oriented towards community development objectives has yet to be... more In Australia, engaged scholarship oriented towards community development objectives has yet to be recognised in funding regimes as being inherently beneficial in terms of scholarly excellence and university rankings. While the civic role of universities is acknowledged by individual universities, higher education management and at the Federal policy level, they are most often framed as funding problems related to ‘community service’ rather than as research opportunities which can raise the university’s profile by providing the basis for excellent research outputs and community enrichment. Community engagement has become a familiar term in the Australian higher education lexicon in recent years but there is still little institutional infrastructure that directly embodies the principles and sentiment of community engagement evident in current Australian universities. In this paper, the inaugural Director and Research Manager of the University of Queensland’s Community Service and Rese...
Healthy child development is determined by a combination of physical, social, family, individual,... more Healthy child development is determined by a combination of physical, social, family, individual, and environmental factors. Thus far, the majority of child development research has focused on the influence of individual, family and school environments, and largely ignored the neighborhood context despite the increasing policy interest. Yet given that neighborhoods are the locations where children spend large periods of time outside of home and school, it is plausible the physical design of neighborhoods (built environment), including access to local amenities, can impact on child development. The relatively few studies exploring this relationship support associations between child development and neighborhood destinations, green spaces, interaction with nature, traffic exposure, and housing density. These studies emphasise the need to more deeply understand how child development outcomes might be influenced by the neighborhood built environment. Pursuing this research space is well...
There is a growing need for innovative methods of dealing with complex, social problems. New type... more There is a growing need for innovative methods of dealing with complex, social problems. New types of collaborative efforts have emerged as a result of the inability of more traditional bureau-cratic hierarchical arrangements such as departmental programs to resolve these problems. Net-work structures are one such arrangement that is at the forefront of this movement. Although collaboration through network structures establishes an innovative response to dealing with social issues, there remains an expectation that outcomes and processes are based on traditional ways of working. It is necessary for practitioners and policy makers alike to begin to understand the realities of what can be expected from network structures in order to maximize the benefits of these unique mechanisms. There is a growing realization that one of the biggest challenges for contemporary governments centers on re-solving highly complex and intractable social problems, such as poverty, unemployment, homelessne...
In recent years, a number of liveability and benchmarking indices and studies have been published... more In recent years, a number of liveability and benchmarking indices and studies have been published to assess the relative position of various ‗global cities ‘ against each other in various categories. These liveability measures are typically used as a tool to make comparisons between cities with various outcome ‗scores ‘ receiving widespread media attention. Results are increasingly publicised by cities that score highly, particularly to secure business and human capital, and by companies to determine remuneration and conditions for expatriates. In Australia, there has been considerable attention devoted to focusing more on the general quality-of-life of a city from the perspective of existing citizens under the guise of ‗liveability‘. There is growing evidence that such measures are being taken up increasingly by larger urban local governments to track progress in improving elements of liveability in the community. However, to date, there is no established theoretical framework or u...
... Section 4 What the Community Says ... In Goodna, the integrated response also needs to be bas... more ... Section 4 What the Community Says ... In Goodna, the integrated response also needs to be based on ensuring that staff understand the needs of children ... range of services involved in the integrated response to know which partnerships and referral pathways they need to develop. ...
The arts remain largely absent from place-based policy, planning and programming in Australia, de... more The arts remain largely absent from place-based policy, planning and programming in Australia, despite a long history of working in place-based ways to create positive social change in communities. This systematic review aimed to address this absence, by providing a synthesis of evidence about the role that place-based arts can play in advancing social equity and addressing social disadvantage. Findings reveal a potential for the arts to create change across individual, community and societal levels, yet empirical evidence to support this potential is weak. Stronger evaluation frameworks that can support capturing the impact of localised place-based arts initiatives for translation into policy and practice are discussed.
Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement, 2008
In Australia, engaged scholarship oriented towards community development objectives has yet to be... more In Australia, engaged scholarship oriented towards community development objectives has yet to be recognised in funding regimes as being inherently beneficial in terms of scholarly excellence and university rankings. While the civic role of universities is acknowledged by individual universities, higher education management and at the Federal policy level, they are most often framed as funding problems related to ‘community service’ rather than as research opportunities which can raise the university’s profile by providing the basis for excellent research outputs and community enrichment. Community engagement has become a familiar term in the Australian higher education lexicon in recent years but there is still little institutional infrastructure that directly embodies the principles and sentiment of community engagement evident in current Australian universities. In this paper, the inaugural Director and Research Manager of the University of Queensland’s Community Service and Rese...
Healthy child development is determined by a combination of physical, social, family, individual,... more Healthy child development is determined by a combination of physical, social, family, individual, and environmental factors. Thus far, the majority of child development research has focused on the influence of individual, family and school environments, and largely ignored the neighborhood context despite the increasing policy interest. Yet given that neighborhoods are the locations where children spend large periods of time outside of home and school, it is plausible the physical design of neighborhoods (built environment), including access to local amenities, can impact on child development. The relatively few studies exploring this relationship support associations between child development and neighborhood destinations, green spaces, interaction with nature, traffic exposure, and housing density. These studies emphasise the need to more deeply understand how child development outcomes might be influenced by the neighborhood built environment. Pursuing this research space is well...
There is a growing need for innovative methods of dealing with complex, social problems. New type... more There is a growing need for innovative methods of dealing with complex, social problems. New types of collaborative efforts have emerged as a result of the inability of more traditional bureau-cratic hierarchical arrangements such as departmental programs to resolve these problems. Net-work structures are one such arrangement that is at the forefront of this movement. Although collaboration through network structures establishes an innovative response to dealing with social issues, there remains an expectation that outcomes and processes are based on traditional ways of working. It is necessary for practitioners and policy makers alike to begin to understand the realities of what can be expected from network structures in order to maximize the benefits of these unique mechanisms. There is a growing realization that one of the biggest challenges for contemporary governments centers on re-solving highly complex and intractable social problems, such as poverty, unemployment, homelessne...
In recent years, a number of liveability and benchmarking indices and studies have been published... more In recent years, a number of liveability and benchmarking indices and studies have been published to assess the relative position of various ‗global cities ‘ against each other in various categories. These liveability measures are typically used as a tool to make comparisons between cities with various outcome ‗scores ‘ receiving widespread media attention. Results are increasingly publicised by cities that score highly, particularly to secure business and human capital, and by companies to determine remuneration and conditions for expatriates. In Australia, there has been considerable attention devoted to focusing more on the general quality-of-life of a city from the perspective of existing citizens under the guise of ‗liveability‘. There is growing evidence that such measures are being taken up increasingly by larger urban local governments to track progress in improving elements of liveability in the community. However, to date, there is no established theoretical framework or u...
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Papers by Geoffrey Woolcock