Implementing an institution-wide community-engaged learning program: the leadership and management challenge

In an earlier chapter we described the context and circumstances that gave rise to PACE - Macquarie University’s Professional and Community Engagement program: a transformative learning and engagement program that would connect all Macquarie’s undergraduates with local, regional and international partners where they would work on projects that contributed to the partner’s mission and goals. Translating this ambitious vision for PACE into sustainable practice presented the University with a complex leadership and management challenge, particularly given the program’s institution-wide scope and scale and its fundamentally collaborative and distributed nature. While the combination of these features would distinguish the program in the Australian higher education sector, they also posed significant implementation and sustainability challenges on multiple fronts. This chapter distils key elements of the approach taken to address these challenges, contextualising the discussion within recent scholarship on leadership in knowledge-based organizations.