Dinner Speech Australasian University Community Engagement Association (AUCEA) Conference July 2010 (Edited)
I am glad I now I know how to pronounce your acronym. I was pronouncing it Auca which conjures up images of South American Indians, who incidentally had their own version of community engagement via warriors and spears. A U CEA has a much more sophisticated ring to it and I am sure, more sophisticated ways of engagement.
I have to admit to having never heard of AUCEA until Ann Langworthy and Jo Archer landed in my office one day and enthusiastically described the conference and why I should be involved. Resistance was obviously futile in the face of two determined women and it was a good opportunity to demonstrate our partnership and engagement with UTAS.
NRM North is a statute based body, established in 2002 to undertake regional planning for our natural resources, to invest in achieving community aspirations for those natural resources and to engage the community in understanding and the best use of those natural resources.
We are one of three regions in Tasmania and one of 56 in Australia. In your satchels you have a list of the 56. We figured that there was no point in promoting our wares to most of you, so instead wanted to encourage you to contact you own regional NRM Body/CMA/NRM Region and see what engagement opportunities you might unearth.
NRM North is a funny beast in that it has two masters, a minister and a community driven association. While that can create reporting and constitutional nightmares at times, when it comes to engagement, we have the advantage of a foot in both camps. Engaging with government can be tortuous, almost as tortuous as engaging with a university.
And engaging with community around some of the more contentious issues that we deal with, native forests, drinking water quality, silt in the Tamar Estuary, forestry, regional land use planning, is quite literally dancing on a tightrope over the Nigeria falls at times. But it is those difficult parts of engagement that are also the most satisfying. To take a sceptical community and see them develop their own innovative solutions with an eye on the future. To take divided communities and broker a new perspective. The hard bits are generally the best bits in engagement, at least after the wash up.
Allow me a little philosophical aside. So often engagement is thought of purely as an activity, something just to be done. And yet to connect with others it is the most basic of human instincts, except maybe for hermits. It is the fuel that drives so much of our emotional fulfilment, when we engage with others, we find new ways in which to relate and grow. Some of us do find it harder than others. According to Myer Briggs I am 90% introverted and even I can see the benefit of engagement with others. And it really is no different at an organisational level. Institutions after all are made up of people. The challenge is to find a collective vision for engagement with those whom we collectively agree are the relationships which will offer the most in fulfilling mutual needs.
But I digress. Let me give you a snapshot of our relationship with UTAS and the engagement that has generated.
We have worked with UTAS and the AMC pretty much since our inception in 2002 (and I suspect the NRM regions in your patch may well be doing the same with your uni) but it was not until recently that we gave that activity, and a whole bunch of new relationships and activities, a formal affiliation through an MOU. And I acknowledge the effort of Jo Archer in getting that process going and David Rich who willingly, I think, signed up for us to engage and work together.
As a result we are providing 3 undergraduate/honours scholarships a year and at the moment are negotiating our 3rd PhD scholarship. One of these is developing 3D virtual realities for engaging people with climate change. In other words, promise the sceptic a 3d reality game and suddenly finds himself in an altered world where climate change is a reality. Instant conversion. Real engagement!. The focus of all these scholarships are areas of common interest but most importantly, the recipents come and sit in our office for at least a few weeks in the year, participate in our team meetings and are mentored by a staff member, they become part of our team. Nothing very new I know, but imagine the level of engagement with all the community sectors if a critical mass of organisations took on students in this way.
We also provide staff to do occasional lecturing in their areas of expertise and interest. This provides them with a breather from the office and an opportunity to get away from the day to day grind and spend some “thinking” time. Students love it, they get to heckle someone different. My staff love it because it is something different to spreadsheets.
We have agreed with the AMC to be part of their staff “Friday drinks” to build the relationships in an informal setting. We use UTAS research facilities and people in a commercial way. In fact we have spent over a million dollars through various research projects this way. We are collaborating along with some other partners in a large scale landscape public art exhibition. We have a number of UTAS staff both chairing and participating in our many technical committees. We have a UTAS staff member on our board. David even kindly lent his board room for a recent board meeting. We have sponsored a whole range of events and activities in conjunction with UTAS, from films to theatre and some pretty out there stuff for us. One of these was a photographic exhibition of the underwater world of the Tamar. This was a fantastic collaboration between a UTAS researcher who had these amazing photos of what life under the water really looks like, and an organisation was just dying to get the message out that the Tamar is not all mud and silt and that it really is worth protecting.
All in the effort to engage the community at large in what we, UTAS and NRM North, have to collectively offer for the common good.
So out of all that, what have I learnt. Engagement is not just an activity, it’s about teaming up together to kick goals, but more than that, to find ways to together make the world a better place through our expanded knowledge, our collective actions and our relationships.
Let me finish with my favourite innovation quote
Nearly 100% of innovation – from business to politics – is inspired not by “market analysis” but by people who are supremely pissed off by the way things are.
True engagement comes, not from some beauracratic imperative but from people who are sick of the status quo and want to make our institutions more useful, our communities more active and the world a better place. And so I hope AUCEA continues to do the fantastic work it is in promoting just that within our future leaders and thinkers.
