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2025 Newsletter 1

Wominjeka, welcome back to 2025 – a new year that brings change, challenges, and possibilities. We ignite our third year as a Faculty Centre knowing there is much to do and being mindful of how we go about it. The imperatives of the Centre: Anthropocene challenges; Decolonising knowledge and practices; and nurturing our supportive community or researchers, are more needed than ever before. 

Monday January 27, 2025

Dear Centre Members, HDR Colleagues, and Allied members, 

Wominjeka, welcome back to 2025 – a new year that brings change, challenges, and possibilities. We ignite our third year as a Faculty Centre knowing there is much to do and being mindful of how we go about it. The imperatives of the Centre: Anthropocene challenges; Decolonising knowledge and practices; and nurturing our supportive community or researchers, are more needed than ever before. 

We report this year on our impact as a Centre as part of the process to be considered for continuing funding. As we progress through the year we invite you to share narratives and insights about how our efforts are impacting your research practices.

One change you will notice this year is that the CRF newsletter will come fortnightly. There is so much happening in our fields that it can feel overwhelming at times and we must all manage our workloads effectively as we transition to a new model. We will continue to curate opportunities that come to our attention and members’ news so that the newsletter remains relevant, informative, and useful. We anticipate that you will find a restful spot fortnightly, where you can engage with the CRF newsletter and enjoy being in community.

We have many highlights to this year and have already begun to negotiate our Calendar of Events – see below. As more dates firm up we will include these and send out calendar invites to all CRF members, HDR Colleagues, and Allied Members.

What are your research sticking points for 2025? This year we have an increased percentage of our funding available to enable the research of Centre members. The Enabler funds may be used to get a new project started, bring a project to conclusion, or move a project along in the middle. Funding can be accessed with a short application to the Enabler research ecology funding (via formstack). These funds may enable your research to progress through providing organisational support, communications, engagement and impact support, project planning, grant writing, literature review, ethics planning and writing, videography, graphic design, transcription, or support with surveys and data. We are continuing the initiative of providing small post-doctoral project opportunities as well, please see the detail below. You may have a recent PhD graduate who would benefit from this opportunity.

Our CRF foci for this year include mobilising our Turbo Charger by connecting formally to centres, groups, and networks internationally. These connections are to intentionally increase your opportunities to build strong international relationships that enable research opportunities. Please consider lending your connections to the CRF for formalising.

We have planned many events (Regenerators, the CRF Retreat, and other strand focussed events) to assist you to develop your researchers skills in line with your research trajectory. For example, we had some CRF members promoted last year and this year we would like to collaborate to connect our promotion planning with our Deakin Achieve processes. We will build on our Goal Setter strategy (meetings for reflection and mentoring at the end of 2024 – with a small budget to cover facilitating snacks) as we focus on horizontal or co-mentoring … all CRF members, HDR Colleagues and Allied members have great contributions to make to others research trajectories. Let’s see how we can mobilise and collaborate.

A specific initiative is our CRF retreat – for CRF members and HDR Colleagues only (sorry Allied members – but let us know if you are interested in participating – we might be able to find a way). We are planning to head back to Warrnambool this year and invite you to become a part of our retreat planning team. We will set priorities and devise a program. The booking will be managed by us (Peta and Jo), but the ideas and details will be collaboratively decided. Please email the CRF inbox if you would like to contribute to our planning. regeneratingfutures@deakin.edu.au

In this newsletter you will find our soon to be held Futures Forum details and other interesting opportunities. 

We hope that you find this a useful contribution and engage in our community.

Best wishes for the start of 2025…

Jo and Peta