Geoff WOOLCOCK, PhD; MAICD

Geoff Woolcock is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southern Queensland¿s Institute for Resilient Regions, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Griffith University¿s School of Human Services and Social Work and QUT¿s Centre for Children¿s Health Research. He is particularly interested in applying indicators of community strengths in socio-economically disadvantaged communities and the factors that contribute to building child- and youth-friendly communities. His work with large-scale public and private sector organisations concentrates on developing measures of communities' strengths, closely collaborating with local communities. Geoff is an experienced social researcher with considerable expertise in social and community service planning and evaluation, including social impact assessment and project evaluation, social capital and community capacity building. He has 25 years community-based research experience nationally and internationally, in housing, youth and health sectors, and has co-published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and community reports. As a Member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (MAICD), he is a board director of the Brisbane Housing Company, the Australian National Development Index (ANDI) and the Logan Child-Friendly Community Charitable Trust overseeing the high-profile collective impact initiative, Logan Together. Geoff is also an inaugural member of the Queensland chapter of the Social Impact Measurement Network of Australia (SIMNA), a Research Fellow at the Life Course Centre of Excellence, and an active member of the Korean Research Foundation-funded Community Wellbeing Institute. As a co-director of the company Global Talent Tracker, he has worked closely with the Australian Football League (AFL) for several years and is a Visiting Professor at Loughborough University¿s Institute for Sports Business. He was the Australian member on the executive committee for the Asia-Pacific Child-Friendly Cities Network (2010-2013) and the inaugural Queensland convenor for the Australian Research Alliance for Children & Youth (ARACY) from 2013-2014. Geoff is a partner investigator in the ARC Linkage project, the Kids in Community Study (KiCS), an offshoot of the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) where qualitative assessments of critical factors determining the success of several "outlier" communities in low income neighbourhoods are being undertaken, and an advisor to another ARC Linkage, the CREATE project, testing the conditions for collective impact in child wellbeing in a range of Communities for Children sites throughout eastern Australia. He also established the web portal Child-Friendly Communities Australia to encourage local communities across Australia to undertake their own state of children¿s reports. Geoff is a frequent public speaker and commentator about bettering the built and natural environments for children and youth using a whole-of-community approach.