Current Collaborative Projects
Many of the problems that affect children's wellbeing cannot be solved by a single person, organisation or sector. Only by combining the knowledge, skills and resources of a broad array of people and organisations can we understand the underlying nature of these problems and develop effective and feasible solutions to address them.
ARACY is committed to developing and supporting new collaborations of researchers, policy makers and practitioners from a broad range of disciplines. We believe collaboration leads to more innovative thinking, more relevant research, and better targeted programs and interventions, to build a stronger future for Australia's children and young people.
This section provides an overview of the range of projects on which ARACY is currently focusing.
ARACY's social change strategy: ARACY is working to make the wellbeing of children and young people a national priority by changing the way our society values and treats them. ARACY’s social change strategy aims to stop the growing trend in preventable problems faced by many of Australia's children and young people. Read more.
Protecting children: ARACY has produced a report that takes a systems-based approach to child protection, by examining the ways that systems and organisations can collaborate to deliver the best outcomes for children. The central question that this report addresses is how to move to a stronger focus on prevention. Read more.
Children in research: The compendium Involving Children and Young People in Research provides researchers, policy makers and ethics committees with a wealth of material for assessing and addressing the ethical and practical issues around participatory research with children and young people. Read more.
Advancing Collaboration Practice: ARACY has established the Advancing Collaboration Practice program to build the capacity of organisations to establish successful collaborations that can more effectively address complex problems impacting on the wellbeing of children and young people in Australia. Read more.
Child readiness to Learn: Child readiness to learn refers to the ability of children to develop and learn at each stage of life, from conception onwards. Through a staged collaborative process, the project aims to identify the points of intervention where most benefit will be achieved in reducing the impact of poverty on children’s ability to learn. Read more.
Preventing Youth Violence: ARACY is undertaking a cross-sector collaborative project aimed at preventing violent and antisocial behaviours among young people. Read more.
Measuring the outcomes of community organisations: This project will focus on measures of service quality, outcomes and effectiveness, and link these to strategies that improve support for Community Service Organisations. Read more.
Children and media: The focus of this project is media and the wellbeing of children in their early years (0 - 8). How media is used – media and digital literacy - and how to facilitate the creation of content suitable for children, are among the issues to be explored. Read more.
Social and emotional wellbeing indicators: ARACY has begun work on a project to examine conceptualisations of social and emotional wellbeing indicators for children and young people and the implications for policy and practice. This project is a first critical step towards our ultimate aim of achieving international comparability of social and emotional wellbeing indicators in order to better inform – and track the success of – policy and practice that aims to improve outcomes for Australian children and young people. Read more.
Middle years strategy: Australia has a national early childhood development strategy and youth strategy – but what about a policy framework or strategy for the middle years, children aged 8-14?
Let ARACY know if you’re interested in working with us to develop a middle years framework. Read more.
ARACY Research Network
Seed funding: The ARACY Research Network has created a Seed Funding program to support new research on priority issues facing children and young people in Australia. Applications for fifth round of seed funding now open. Read more.
New Investigators Network: The ARACY Research Network has developed an innovative program to support promising early career researchers. The program was established to help develop the skills of high-calibre early career researchers in working across disciplines, the use of longitudinal data, and transferring knowledge on child and youth health, development and wellbeing into policy and practice. Read more.