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 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.

Geoff has 25 years community-based research experience nationally and internationally, across the community service sectors, and has co-published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and community reports.  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.

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 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 co-established the web portal Child-Friendly Communities Australia to encourage local communities across Australia to undertake their own state of children’s reports.