Autumn Newsletter 2025

As the weather gets cooler, we write to you with some ‘warming’ news about upcoming Engagement Australia activities. First and foremost, our annual conference returns with UQ hosting on July 22 and 23. The conference theme is “Transformational Partnerships: Creating Lasting Impact” which is not only a concern for engagement practitioners but also Australian universities as more questions are asked about our social license and whether we deliver on the level of societal impact discussed in the Universities Accord. An exciting list of speakers is developing and we hope to see you in sunny Queensland. Do take advantage of the early bird tickets (by June 3).

We are also launching the 2025 Engagement Australia Excellence Awards with submission closing August 11. We look forward to recognising high quality work across multiple categories. Please consider making a submission to one or more awards categories in 2025.

Transform: The Journal of Engaged Scholarship continues to go from strength to strength with the next call for papers closing June 16. Coming soon will also be our first special issue from the IARSLCE Asia Pacific X International Conference on Service-Learning, Hong Kong being released mid-year. When you add this to the work begun with IARSLCE and Professor Andrew Furco on setting a community engagement and service-learning research agenda for Australia (and hopefully New Zealand), there is exciting work happening with our shared scholarship.

We look forward to engaging with you further in the suite of activities listed below, and also within the Engagement Australia Carnegie Community Engagement Network that  continues to draw strong engagement from the sector as we move toward the next round of Carnegie classification launched at the EA conference. For now, brew an extra warm drink and read on below.

Verity Firth and Matthew Pink, Autumn, 2025