International talks highlight innovative university-community partnerships

UQ Ipswich will blaze new trails later this month [July 2001] with a three-day international conference on university-community partnerships.

More than 100 people from community groups, Australian and international universities will descend on the city of Ipswich for the Inside Out conference on July 16-18.

Inside Out is being sponsored by the UQ Ipswich Community Service and Research Centre (CSRC).

The conference will be a catalyst for national discussion on an emerging trend towards community and university team-building in dealing with community issues, according to CSRC director Bruce Muirhead.

"This is more than student placements or academic service," Mr Muirhead said.

"New models of education and research are bringing together the intellectual resources of the university and the concrete experiences of the local community.

"This relationship blurs distinctions between teaching, research and service and creates mutually-beneficial partnerships."

Mr Muirhead said that in its first two years of operations, the CSRC had worked with about 155 groups and developed 80 partnerships with government, business and community agencies.

Many other universities had similar initiatives, he said, and the conference program would offer plenty of scope for exchanging ideas from regional and inner-city situations in Australia, Asia, the USA, U.K. and Sweden.

Topics for discussion would include civic responsibility, aligning academic initiatives with community renewal, non-profit organisations as agents of change, community and regional development and innovative government.

"This conference will challenge and open up a range of new possibilities for many of us and we plan to have a position paper for national discussion as one of the outcomes," Mr Muirhead said.

A few places are still available for part or full-time attendance at the conference. Contact Noreen Kelly, UQ Ipswich (telephone 07 3381 1908 or email insideout@staff.uq.edu.au).

The CSRC is an initiative of the University of Queensland's Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences in partnership with the Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (International and Development).

For more information, contact Mr Bruce Muirhead, CSRC Director (telephone 3381 1512, email bruce.muirhead@mailbox.uq.edu.au) or Moya Pennell, UQ Communications (telephone 3365 2846, email m.pennell@mailbox.uq.edu).