Swinburne’s ARC Linkage grant will focus on building social connections

A new ARC Linkage research project will explore how to improve neighbourhood connections and wellbeing.

Swinburne’s Professor Jane Farmer is setting out to find, perpetuate and grow connections in communities. Aaron Francis/The Australian

Social isolation and distress in communities are problems Jane Farmer and her team have been studying for several years, but their latest research aims to come up with a definitive set of advice to councils, agencies, not-for-profit organisations and others about how to grapple with these deep and difficult issues.

Significantly, the study, one of 67 collectively awarded $31.7m under the latest round of the federal government’s Australian Research Council Linkage Projects scheme, will come at the issues from a positive angle.

“We’re taking the approach of looking at strengths – not looking at loneliness but looking at connections,” says Farmer, director of Swinburne University of Technology’s Social Innovation Research Institute.

“If you approach the issue of connecting people up from the point of view that says ‘Are you lonely?’, then it entrenches and spreads the notion of loneliness.

“We are taking the approach of looking at existing social connection and building off what people already have, even if it’s just going to the shops.”

One technique used will be what Farmer calls “go-alongs”, in which researchers will gain consent from community members to accompany them as they go about their normal range of daily activities to gauge how much connection they already have in their local communities.

“We use that as a way of kind of generating a lived experience, a story or narrative, plus we overlay (those movements) on the maps of where the social connection assets are in the community,” Farmer says. The project also includes assessing and working out ways to optimise the digital relationships people may have.

“All councils are introducing online services and they want to know how best to do it,” Farmer says. “They’re super cognisant of digital inclusion issues.”

Seeing what is already working well across a range of communities – such as where the points of natural gathering are and what makes them that way – will inform the ultimate aim of setting up newly created suburbs and communities for success, and helping those established to retrofit.

Farmer says it will focus on “looking at what the environment needs to look like, what actions individuals can take, what staffing organisations might need to have, and then what policy might need to do”.

“What I want to do is make something that goes with what they already have,” she says. “So it’s not reinventing the wheel, but fits nicely into their practises and is not completely alien.”

Previous work with the Australian Red Cross Victoria generated a framework of ideas the researchers will test during the course of this research.

A condition of receiving linkage funding is that applicants must partner with and receive fin­ancial support from industry, business and community organ­isations. In announcing the new round, Education Minister Alan Tudge stressed that each must have “real-world benefits for Australians”.

Farmer’s three-year project received $485,000 from the ARC but another $400,000 in funding and additional in-kind support from six partners makes it a nearly $1m enterprise. As well as the Australian Red Cross Victoria, the researchers will work with mental health not-for-profit organisation Neami National, Casey City Council, City of Whittlesea, Wyndham City Council and Today Strategic Design which, among other things, co-designs resources for community use.

Other funding awarded in the linkage round includes $664,000 to Macquarie University to improve satellite communication and manage space debris through the development and use of diamond-based lasers.

The Australian National University received $655,000 to develop a new low-cost hydrogen storage system, and Curtin University received $396,000 to develop an online maritime traffic monitoring system to prevent collisions at sea and streamline the passage of goods and trade.