CLM Board Statement on Community of Practice

Engineers Australia College of Leadership and Management

Board Statement on Humanitarian Engineering

Community of Practice

Preamble

On 27 May 19 the CLM Board decided to support the development of a Humanitarian Engineering Community of Practice (CoP) within the umbrella of the College.

 Since the early 1980s several dedicated organisations utilising engineering to address humanitarian and development challenges have emerged. These include Registered Engineers for Disaster Relief (RedR), and Engineers Without Borders (EWB).  EA conducted the Year of Humanitarian Engineering in 2011.  Follow up activities within in EA were discussed and Humanitarian Engineering was proposed as a subset of the Sustainability Engineering Society (SENG) within the Environmental College, but this was never developed.

Vision

The Humanitarian Engineering CoP has been developed by Canberra and Sydney CLM Branches over the last 18 months.  This CoP will be open to EA members and interested non-EA participants (as are the two other EA CoPs).  This is considered important because Humanitarian Engineering and Humanitarian work more generally are not solely the province of engineers. An IT platform similar to EA Xchange, the online space for members to collaborate, share their experiences and network will be used.

Actions

The nascent capability will be developed by Canberra and Sydney CLM Branches in consultation with National CLM Branches and selected external stakeholders by the end of 2019.

The Humanitarian Engineering CoP will be expanded and officially launched once the development work is completed in 2020

Acknowledgements

I congratulate the initiative and determination of the Sydney and Canberra CLM Branches collectively and particularly the individual efforts of Dr R. Care, Mr R. Mitchell, and Mr J. Smith.

Leadership takes many forms and I look forward to promoting further leadership initiatives across our CLM Membership like the Humanitarian Engineering CoP

DR A. Hellstedt

Chair

College of Leadership and Management